All Going in the Memoir
by Pseudinymous
Summary: [Jazz Phantom AU] Instead of Danny activating the Fenton Portal, it's Jazz - and she has exactly no idea what she's doing. With no close friends and almost no ability to fight, how is she going to cope? An acute examination of the Danny Phantom plot line, and just how different everything could be if his sister was the half-ghost instead.
1. You and What Toaster

**Author's Note:**

So basically, Currently-Lurking (Hollyflash) and I were discussing the amazing _mess_ the Jazz Phantom AU could be, and this happened: Two seasons worth of Danny Phantom plotline, _completely different_ because Jazz being the half ghost changes so much about everything. Eventually it was all too delightful to leave unwritten, so in the course of three hours, I tapped out the beginning.

Prepare for something kind of wild from start to finish. Comedy, drama, angst, all of it - that's why I categorised the fic as General.

Enjoy! (And please review. I do try to check out the fics of reviewers to return the favour, when I can. Plus, they're great motivation. Concrit is quite welcome too.)

* * *

 _Ch. 1: You and What Toaster_

* * *

A set of bright but apprehensive teal eyes started at the base of that incredibly useless contraption, then found themselves floating up to the very top of its rim; a great big metallic abyss stuck in the side of the basement wall. A machine which was under construction by Maddie and Jack Fenton for three years, only to find out that the fruits of their labour had been unsuccessful.

Jazz gave a self-satisfied little laugh. Of course it'd been unsuccessful. They'd spent the better part of their lives researching methods to dig their way into a dimension that didn't exist. They called it the Ghost Zone, but aside from the ridiculous name for an equally ridiculous concept, no part of it had any basis in reality.

… And yet here she was, staring at their failed invention.

A shudder tickled at the very centre of her being, but she wasn't sure why. This thing didn't work, so what was there to be scared of? What she did know, however, was that she needed to be here, needed to see it before her parents ripped it back out of the wall and started over. No one was home — no one would know, and no one could stop her. And as much as she didn't believe in ghosts, the Fenton Ghost Portal still held a few microns of her curiosity.

That and — though she would never admit it to anyone except to herself in absolute private — she was trying just a little to procrastinate on her midyears revision. The task was gargantuan, as it always was for over-achievers, and her brain sorely needed a break.

As she looked up at this thing a small part of her felt bad that the portal hadn't fired to life. Her parents had dragged both her and her brother down into the basement laboratory simply to witness its grand switching on, only for it to spark and fizzle out so sadly. She'd never seen them that depressed in her life, so depressed that rather than cooking the celebratory meal they were going to have, they'd left the house to haul themselves to the Nasty Burger. Danny had gone too, never to pass up an opportunity for fast food, but Jazz had resolved to continue studying.

At least, until now.

She made a few more haphazard steps towards the portal, side-eyeing the cupboard beside it and then looking away. Maddie had always insisted on wearing hazmat suits whenever one was handling the equipment down here, and Jazz had found her unfortunate self suited up in one more than several embarrassing times in her life. She just really couldn't appreciate the things like her parents did. In any case, the portal didn't work, so what possible danger would it be to her? It wasn't like she was going to be touching anything hazardous.

Still, a shot of apprehension flashed through her veins. She couldn't explain the why of that, either. But she was going to keep on walking, walking to the inside of that portal, to inspect the cables and electronics which lay within.

The portal's metallic gizzards refused to show themselves in the dark. It had its own lighting system, she remembered — the lights inside the basement were unfortunately inadequate for brightening the interior of the machine. She looked around inside, squinting. There were metal plates in here covered with buttons, but she at least knew which was which, as they were all appropriately labelled. There was, of course, the startup button, bizarrely placed far inside the portal, which she avoided like the plague. Beside it however was a large handle-switch which controlled the lights. After making absolutely sure she wasn't confusing it with anything else, Jazz gingerly pulled it down.

Whining. Electric whining. Green lights blared around the outside rim of the portal, and for a moment Jazz's heart leapt to her throat — was it possible the switch was miswired with that button? Had she just turned it on while she was still inside? No… no! She had to get out. She had to get out now!

But she couldn't. Her foot caught on one of the wires running along the bottom of the portal, tripping her over and smacking her face straight into the cold metal floor. Lights started blinking.

… And then, they stayed on. The whining stopped. Jazz looked up. The inside of the portal was perfectly visible, now, and she felt silly, so silly, for ever thinking her parents would be stupid enough to mislabel the damn on button. They may have been maniacs, sure, maniac ghost hunters — but they knew what they were doing with technology. They knew about safety. And they certainly knew about double-checking every label they put on something.

The girl got to her feet, still a little shaken that she was half-expecting to get shocked to death. Ludicrous! Still, one scare was well and truly enough for one day, and her schoolwork was starting to seem significantly more interesting than being convinced she was about to die. She was careful this time not to trip over any wires, keeping her eyes firmly planted on the floor. She went back over to the lever and pushed it up to turn the lights back off. The only working parts of the Fenton Ghost Portal died down, and she was left in darkness.

She took a step. There was another wire she didn't see. Jazz wobbled as she tried to maintain her balance, thrusting a hand out to the wall on reflex to steady herself. What it found, however, was not a wall, but a control panel.

The on switch.

The portal was whining, but this time far more dangerously. Jazz's breath set up shop in her throat as she thought one thing and one thing only; _get out!_ And she bolted, different lights inside the portal racing around her and outpacing her to the end until she found herself immobile in one of those strange moments. A moment where time had ground to a halt, and her mind could only hold a single thought; the knowledge that this was it, that she wasn't going to make it.

She didn't even have time to thrust a hand out into the open. She hadn't gotten far enough.

Electric conductors flared to life. Bright green engulfed her vision, and with an odd distance, she heard something so loud that it tore through her eardrums — was it her own voice? White-hot pain flared and spidered through every one of her veins, splintering them apart, but somehow she was dissociated from it. Distantly aware that this was happening, but able to think strangely clearly about the situation as it was playing out…

She was going to die. Something deep inside her, something screaming, was telling her that. The voltage of the Fenton Portal was extremely high and the amplitude more than sufficient to kill a grown human. Her parents had repeated those words to her and Danny over and over again, making absolutely sure they understood the seriousness of electrical safety. And today, she'd ignored their warnings. … Why had she ignored their warnings? Boredom? Scepticism? It was too late to correct any of that now! She was going to die, and she had no one to blame except herself. Not that it would matter when the timeless oblivion finally claimed her mind…

The stream of consciousness slammed to a halt, replaced by the searing reality of the bright neon light, the horrific, unspeakable pain. Now she knew for sure that the odd sound destroying her hearing was indeed made up of screams coming from her own mouth.

Finally, after what seemed like hours or even days, everything snapped to black.

Jazz collapsed on the floor.

* * *

When Jazz's eyes fluttered open, she was greeted by a frightening sea of brilliant green light. In front of her lay endless hypnotic swirls, taunting her eyes with their inherent impossibility. Where was she? The… the inside of the ghost portal? With a squint she could make out those trademark Fenton electronics, the cables which ran across the floor — but all of these were engulfed in that green light too, supposed "ectoplasm" running through the veins of this enormous and terrifying machine.

Her memory sliced its way back into her mind, unforgiving of the strange circumstances. She'd been in here when the portal had turned on. The pain. The screaming. … Those frightening moments of tranquil introspection. And she was awake?

… How was she even alive after all of that? She should've been dead! … It'd certainly hurt enough.

Before she figured anything else out, however, she needed to get the heck out of this portal. Those glowing swirls in front of her must have been the exit into the lab, because she was facing that exit when it had turned on. Did… did that mean the portal was working? Surely that couldn't mean something as dreadful and impossible as the Ghost Zone was… behind her?

 _No, don't look. Just get out_ , her mind insisted.

First thing was first — she had to get up. Jazz reached out in front of her body to push herself up off the floor, but quickly stopped in cold shock.

That hand was glowing.

Was it some kind of strange after-effect from ectoplasm-enriched electrocution? How could it even… be like that, how was it possible to glow? Her mother had always said that ghosts glow, but—

Jazz's thoughts hit a solid wall.

 _You're not breathing._

 _You're not breathing. You're not breathing._ Now those words, such simple words with such heavy implication, danced around her head. Her heart would have shuddered to a stop, but indeed that too had already happened; there was no thudding in her chest, no soft urge to continue drawing breath. In that moment it was as if she was simply existing as a concept rather than as a living being, and her surroundings suddenly seemed that much more bizarre than they had before. What did all of this mean? She had to know. She had to know.

Jazz slowly brought herself to all fours and looked around. Beneath her lay not her twisted, deadened corpse, only more metal and wires. But nonetheless, she glowed, glowed persistently, with no signs of it dying down. The aura was white and soft, and probably would have been a calming thing to see had this not been so completely and dreadfully wrong.

"After effects," she whispered to herself, praying to all the gods she didn't believe in. "It's just after effects."

Then she stood up, and kept going up.

A strangled yelp writhed its way through her vocal chords before she could stop it. The floor got further and further away from her feet until she found herself hitting the ceiling of the portal with a soft _thump_ , and there she remained stuck because she legitimately had no idea how to get back down. It was as if a switch had flicked on inside of her without warning, and now every trace of gravity had been removed. Her body was light, far too light, as if it were made of something little more than mist in spite of being persistently solid.

Why was all of this happening? She wasn't dead! She couldn't be dead! Where was the body, the corpse? But, just as equally… if that wasn't true, why was she stuck floating up at the ceiling?

She… she didn't believe in ghosts!

Maybe she was hallucinating. At this point it seemed to be the most plausible option — yes, it was entirely likely she was still down on the floor, unconscious or comatose, her body attempting to recover from the shock and distracting her with the wildest delusion it could come up with. As a psychologist-in-training, she knew the brain was more than capable of cooking up all kinds of strange things that felt completely real — especially when under immense stress.

… But unprofessionally, this all felt far too real.

 _Right_ , she thought, _try to think rationally._

The floor, at least a metre below her feet, taunted her.

 _Is this real?_

Not without hesitation, Jazz gave the ceiling a tentative push — just enough to send her back to where her feet could meet terra firma. … Had her jeans become white?

 _Is this permanent?_

She crouched when she got to the floor, latching onto a pipe that ran through the centre of the portal to stop herself from bouncing back up. She still felt weightless — letting go would mean another strange trip into Things Humans Shouldn't Be Able to Do Land, and she steadfastly denied herself that opportunity. Jazz crawled inelegantly along the floor with the pipe as her guide.

 _Ghosts don't exist._

When she stopped moving, the inertia sent a wave of persistently floating hair past her face. It was white. Snow white. Stark white. Whatever way you wanted to describe the purest white you could think of, and like the rest of her body, it glowed. She tried to ignore it — the swirls were before her, but the pipe ended here. For a stretch of several feet there was nothing to hold on to, and she realised with a start that she was just going to have to jump.

 _No._

Jazz swallowed, nerves racing. Maybe once she got out of this portal her body would be back to normal. None of this could be real. Maybe it was just the environment she was in now, making her this way. Yes — she'd be perfectly human when she emerged on the other side, and she would never dare speak of this lab accident to her parents ever. She would keep it to herself, a silent insane knowledge of what had gone on here today, and she would go on living her life as normal.

 _There is no body. I'm not dead. I'm not a ghost._

The girl took a breath she didn't need and kicked away from the floor in the direction of the portal's end. A strange, cold sensation washed over her skin the moment she passed through the swirling ectoplasm, and she half-expected to drop like a stone to the floor on the other side. She had all four limbs braced and readied for it, even. But none of that happened — instead, she emerged into her parents' relatively normal basement laboratory, still floating. Still glowing.

"I'm not a ghost!" she screamed into the empty house. The sound echoed away from every wall, repeating itself, taunting her.

"I'm not a ghost," she whispered, falling gently towards the floor.

* * *

Jazz tried to call out for someone, anyone, but the house was empty. No one could hear her.

Somehow she'd managed to cement herself to the ground. She still felt as if she might be spirited away at the slightest gust of wind, but at least keeping both feet on the floor was an improvement. What wasn't an improvement was everything else - she was either suffering the biggest hallucination of her life, or the Fenton Portal had done something truly unspeakable. It was only with great self-control that she fought back her own tears, even if she could still feel them tickling at the surface of her eyes.

Jazz regretted everything. Regretted taking that study break, regretted looking in that damn portal, regretted… she took a forced breath, shuddering. Her arms were braced firmly against herself, both elbows clasped in either hand, and otherwise she was staring at the perfectly normal floor. It taunted her. Yet the tiles below did not move, made no action, because they couldn't — they were inanimate objects. But their very existence seemed to be what disturbed her; how could everything around aside from that damned portal be so normal, so regular, and yet here she was, defying logic and reality? It… it didn't seem right.

For a time she simply knelt upon the ground, staring downwards, attempting and failing to process this bizarre situation. Half of her mind howled that she couldn't be a ghost, that it was impossible, that it defied the very world as she knew it… and the other half knew she was wrong.

Slowly and not without a tremor, she pushed herself up to her feet. This time she at least managed to stay at ground level, but for how long would that last? Regardless of this, she needed to get to the mirror. Needed to see her face. One way or another, she had to truly know what she looked like. The girl slowly put one foot in front of the other, then repeated the movement. She was walking, and though it was unsteady, it was certainly a lot more stable than whatever strange force had sent her careening upwards.

Like in all good laboratories there was an emergency basin, and this one came equipped with the mirror that she sought. She didn't see herself, though, until she'd walked around to the other side of a long shelving column and revealed her reflection.

Terrified green glowing eyes stared back at her. The exact colour of ectoplasm. Surely this was an eye colour that could only be possessed by a ghost.

Jazz placed her hands against the glass, each finger slowly pressing down against its cool, smooth surface. She couldn't hold back the tears anymore — each time she blinked they would run from her eyes, racing down her cheeks like little neon dewdrops. After they left her, they vanished into nothingness, not even having enough time to fall into the sink.

… Is this what she really deserved for her utter foolishness?

" _Mum_!" she cried once more, her voice echoing in that way that was so unnatural. But when she spoke again she didn't have the strength of will to manage anything more than a whisper. "Help me."

Help didn't come.

She couldn't stay down here much longer, not with the awful green glare of the portal casting its evil light over her, not with the reflection of that thing staring back at her. Jazz turned towards the stairs, walking slowly, numbly. The world felt surreal in its insistence of normality, and no matter what she did or how she thought, she couldn't stop it. Everything normal suddenly looked different, intimidating. It was an illustrated separation between the world of the expected and herself in her current state.

As she ascended the stairs, she wasn't even sure her feet had really made contact with each step.

The world on the ground floor remained surreally normal. The fridge whirred. The smoke alarm beeped, begging for enough attention for someone to change its battery. And the dull light from the late afternoon dusk filtered in through the windows, brightening the space just enough to see. She couldn't stand it. She couldn't stand any of this. And suddenly she found herself running, bolting up the hallway stairs, missing at least two at a time. The regularity of everything pounded at her mind. No. No. _No_!

If everything was normal, then she could never participate in this world the same way ever again.

Jazz went to burst into her room. The door was closed. This of course didn't seem to matter, because before she even realised what was happening or what she was doing, she was passing straight through the solid material as if it wasn't even there.

… Only barely did she catch sight of her own form shifting back to the realms of tangibility. The door had run through her being in a way that felt acutely violating; she tingled with the after effects of power she didn't dare entertain she had, because every new emergence was another nail in a terrifyingly literal coffin.

Thoroughly shaken, Jazz lay herself down less than carefully upon her bed. Bearbert Einstein, stuffed and inanimate though he may have been, sat next to her pillow and watched over her. Right now, he was the only thing she had.

Jazz wrapped herself as firmly as she could within her blankets, took Bearbert into her arms, and held him tighter than she ever had before.

 _Please don't let this be happening… please._


	2. Post-Traumatic Portal Disorder

**Author's Note:**

Yay for story reconstruction!

* * *

 _Ch. 2: Post-Traumatic Portal Disorder_

* * *

"Sweetie?"

Though she couldn't quite figure out why, a feeling of distinct unease had settled deep within Jazz as she had slept. Someone was calling to her but her mind was refusing to recognise the voice — who was it? Family? … Who were her family, anyway?

"Hey sweetie, are you okay? Jazz?"

She opened her eyes. Little blots of light in an otherwise darkened room flooded in.

"Oh, thank heavens…" Maddie breathed, giving a great sigh of relief. "… You tried to turn on the portal, didn't you?"

And then the memories came rushing back, chasing away her partially-conscious stupor. She'd tripped over the wire. Accidentally pushed the on switch. And then…

"Mum!" she yelped, sitting straight up. Maddie ducked out of the way just in time to prevent her daughter's head from colliding with her own. "Th-the portal! I-I—"

"Shhh," the mother soothed, reaching out a tentative hand and pushing Jazz by the shoulder gently back into bed. "It's okay sweetie, just rest. You know you did today what no one else in this house could do."

In amongst her own confusion, Jazz caught sight of her own arms. Wait! They were… normal? The glow had disappeared. Everything about them seemed perfectly regular, as if all of the things she had seen, all of the things she had felt…

… None of it had happened?

She was breathing. She could feel her heart beating, too, slowly away within her chest. It was as if everything she'd been through was all in her original hypothesis: a massive, incredibly realistic hallucination, perhaps only present in the first place because she'd brushed so very close to death.

"I can't believe you went in there," said Maddie, her voice still soft. "I can't believe you survived. And not only that, but to have dragged yourself all the way back up here…"

How was she supposed to reply? The very thought to even go down and look at the portal in the first place was truly out-of-character when compared with how she normally acted, and true to form her mother would pick up on that in an instant. But how did Maddie even know Jazz was the one to turn it on?

… Did that mean that part of the hallucination was correct? She really had electrocuted herself in that thing, then crawled out of it and all the way back up to her bedroom?

… Was there a chance that it could have been real?

"Your arm is covered in burns," Maddie noted, and that's when Jazz saw it; terrific lightning-shaped scarring beginning at her hand and disappearing up her sleeve. Her mother's eyes followed the complex arrangement in just the same way Jazz's did, but by the time Maddie was done she just couldn't stop the glassy look of tears collecting in her eyes. "You could have died, Jasmine."

"I-I'm sorry," she stammered. Was she really covered in burns underneath her sleeves, too? But she couldn't feel any of them at all!

"I know." Maddie didn't seem to know what to do or how to react until almost unwillingly a bittersweet laugh escaped her lips. "Maybe you really are a Fenton after all, though. I don't know what to say… I thought three years of our work would just have to be thrown out and demolished. But there you were, too curious about ghosts for anyone to stop you, no matter how many warnings we gave…"

Jazz swallowed, loudly. Maybe she should be telling her mother about the strange incident that had happened afterwards.

"Doesn't matter, honey… I'm just so thankful you're alive," she breathed. "And now, thanks to you, we can truly study ghosts."

For not the first time that day, Jazz found her breath lodged firmly within her throat. Study. Research. Lab experiments. What would happen if her parents found out what she'd actually experienced? Surely they wouldn't hurt her, but… the studies. There would be samples taken, constant curiosity. She'd never get away from their sick obsession with ghosts ever again, even if the entire incident was over now.

No, if she'd somehow become normal again, then she was marching with her knowledge of this and taking it six feet into the grave. She was not a ghost. Something weird had happened, something very weird. But she was not a ghost. She was here, she was alive, and she was breathing. That was good enough.

"M-mum," she croaked, almost unable to get the words out. "I don't know why I did it."

"It's okay. Hey?" Maddie smiled, but one as good at reading body language as Jazz could see that it was disturbingly broken — relief and fear bundled into a neatly disordered package. "Don't you worry about it, I'm not angry. Just, please — don't ever… just promise me you won't ever scare me like that again. Okay?"

"… Okay."

She reached down and ran a hand over Jazz's head. "I'm just going to get you some burn cream. I'll be back in a minute."

Jazz couldn't at all feel the burns but thought it best to nod in agreement anyway. Before leaving the room, Maddie gave her one last reassuring pat on the head, attempting to soothe her daughter from the obvious trauma she'd been through earlier that night. Then, the mother drew herself back to full height and slowly left the room.

The moment she was gone, Jazz was clambering to pull up her sleeve. And there it was — the evidence. Incredible lightning tree-shaped burns, running up through her wrist and all over her arm. She didn't dare inspect just how far it went; she had the most awful feeling that her chest was covered with it too, spidering out and marring her skin. There was… no way that this wasn't going to scar, surely. She had the deepest most implicit knowledge that she'd be wearing it for the rest of her life, although she couldn't say why she felt so sure about that.

… That said, it proved without a doubt that she really had turned on the portal, all the while being inside of it…

And yet, the burns still didn't hurt. Prodding the marks with her fingers only felt like just that: prodding. There was no pain that made her hiss through clenched teeth, no dreadful shooting sensations running up and down her body. It was simply as if the burns had always been there. They didn't even look particularly angry, or as if they were going to cause serious, hospital-worthy problems down the line…

"Here, sweety," said Maddie, her voice floating back into the room. When she peered around her eyes drifted down to Jazz's self-inspections. "I can't even imagine how much that must hurt."

Jazz said nothing. Was it weird that it didn't hurt? … Probably definitely.

"Do you want me to help you put it on?"

No. What she wanted was time alone. Some time to sort out everything that had happened in her head without any other people, and without any interruptions. And then after that maybe Jazz would be able to pull her mind back to its normal functioning state and face the endless questions her parents would dish out at her. She was strong. She could do that. But only if she was granted that time.

"Thanks, it's… okay," Jazz managed. "I think I just need some quiet time…"

For a moment Maddie's left eyebrow had arched worryingly, but it flattened back down again right as a realisation flashed across her face. The resultant smile was soft, understanding. "I can only imagine," she told Jazz, brushing her forehead once again as she placed the burn cream safely within the girl's hands. "Just call if you need any help, okay? I'll go and make a pot of soup for you."

Jazz started unscrewing the burn cream's cap, to show willing.

"Oh, and Jazz?" Maddie added. "No studying tonight, please! You need rest."

"I know I need rest, mum."

Her mother laughed, but was that a hint of dishonesty? "I'm just making sure, sweetie. I know what you're like."

"Yeah, yeah, I know…" she muttered. "Thanks."

"You're welcome, Jazz."

And Jazz breathed one of the biggest sighs of relief she'd ever made once Maddie pulled the door shut behind her. Now was the question of this burn cream — did she really need it if the injuries didn't hurt? Maybe not, but she'd put it on her bedside table for now just in case. Even if they didn't hurt now that didn't mean they weren't going to later.

With this done, she leant back into her pillows, cuddled herself around Bearbert's plush fluffy body, and tried to relax.

She was normal again. Gravity was working as any self-respecting force of nature should. She didn't have to worry anymore because the only reminder that she'd ever done something so overwhelmingly stupid was a simple — though admittedly extensive — skin mark.

Jazz stretched out her arms and legs, nearly at the point of laughing and crying with relief. What she'd experienced earlier that night, surely that was a trip that would stay with her forever.

… Of course, she had no idea how literal that statement would be until she noticed half her arm extended through a wall.

…

Her normal response would have been to scream, but something stopped her. Instead, she could only manage to gaze in quiet, contemplative shock, as her hand refused to obey a supposed law of reality. It tingled vaguely.

But the rest of her… she looked normal. And yet this was happening? Something as ridiculous and preposterous as _this_?

So much for thinking everything was going to be okay — all alone her intangible arm had caused the thin veils covering her problems to come crashing down around her by the curtain rods. With a very deliberate lack of speed she pulled her arm straight back out of the wall, chilled at just how much resistance this action lacked. It wasn't much better once removed, either; it remained persistently strange, placing its uniqueness on vibrant display. It was blue. Worse still, it glowed, and she could see the bookshelf on the other side of her room clearly through it.

The rest of her body was human. But this arm was distinctly ghost. There wasn't any way to deny it.

Terrified but also hesitantly curious, Jazz tested it with a few different solid objects. It passed happily through several bedcovers, a mattress, Bearbert Einstein — not that she was at all happy herself about this arrangement. Once she was quite done with doing the impossible, she just couldn't get it to go back to normal. The arm was determined to pass through anything and everything including her own body, and there was nothing she was able to do about it.

"What are you doing?" Jazz hissed, shaking the intangible arm violently. "Stop it! _Stop it_!"

A quiet chill followed by a pleasantly warm feeling ran through her arm, and just as quickly as the intangibility had happened, it vanished without a trace. Her arm was back to normal.

There was no desperate sigh of relief this time — obviously, she was nowhere near out of the woods yet. Had… had the portal done something to her body? Was that it? The idea was insane, but considering the insane things she'd already been through tonight, perhaps comparatively, it was the sanest option there…

There was still a chance this would all go away, right?

Jazz flopped back onto her pillow. A strip of bright orange hair fell over her eyes, and its colour, its realness alone told her everything was going to be all right. But she didn't feel like everything was going to be fine — she'd seen herself as… undeniably, she'd seen herself as a ghost. Not only that, but she'd done things that no creature except a ghost should rightfully be able to do. How else was it possible to throw her arm through solid objects as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and to, to… float in the air? What laws of physics could possibly allow any of that to happen? How was it possible to be alive, and yet also—

No, she wasn't going to say it. She wasn't a ghost. Just being alive at all proved that.

Her mind wandered back to the incident as she stared at the ceiling. To all of the strange things she had felt, the things she had seen… and inside of herself, if she really focused, there was the tiniest cold spot. It was perhaps just a little to the side of her heart and in the very centre of her chest, and if she hadn't been remembering back to those strange moments she doubted she would have noticed it.

It was there that she rested her mind, hesitantly examining the foreign presence. Cold, but not in an entirely unpleasant way; there was no shivering or discomfort, as if it were just a fact and nothing more. And if she really thought about it, really cast her mind back to the incident, she realised quickly that it was the same chill she'd felt so vaguely in the background while… ghost-like. At the time she'd barely noticed it, but now that the horror was 'over'…

The cold spot grew. She'd thought about it for too long. And now, Jazz couldn't stop it — it was growing and growing and before long she could feel that ethereal cold throughout her entire chest. Few times in her life did she recall moments she'd been that frightened, portal accident excluded; the girl had no idea what was going on, and the flash of light that nearly blinded her once the cold reached the outer layers of her skin only served to further the panic.

The flash of light turned into a blinding ring which duplicated in two, one rushing up around her head and the other down towards her feet. The chill that accompanied it raced through her body as the rings washed over her, and by the time everything was done she'd only barely stopped herself from screaming.

No.

 _Oh no._

Not this again!

Breathing, gone. Heartbeat, gone. The appearance of a normal human girl, _completely_ gone! In front of her were the arms and hands of a ghost through-and-through, and though she was a long way from being able to say how it happened, it had.

"O-okay," she shuddered, staring at her ten ghostly digits. They glowed back at her, vibrantly, and she felt sick. "Obviously this isn't going away then."

There was a moment's pause.

"This can stop now! I've had enough!" said Jazz a little louder, though not quite loud enough to be heard downstairs. "Any time now!"

Her body refused to comply.

"Please?" she begged, her voice down to a whisper now, searching around for that odd feeling in her chest — but it was everywhere, and she didn't know how to banish it. Apparently the solution last time had been to sleep, but she'd been exhausted then! Now she felt far too wide-awake to even consider something like that! So what was she supposed to do — just sit in bed and wait for it to pass?

The minutes came and went, but sitting there and waiting for the problem to resolve itself obviously wasn't going to work. To make matters worse, she was becoming acutely aware that the soup her mother was making downstairs was giving her a time limit to figure this out — as soon as it was cooked, Maddie would be marching back up the stairs again to serve it to her. If she could just make herself human again before that, then her parents would never need to know any of this had happened. She'd be free to continue on with her life while, apparently, having the odd ability to pass clean through solid objects.

… How was she even considering that to be a part of her life from now on? How had it even come to this?

Jazz pulled herself free of the comfortable blanketed prison, because if she didn't do something with herself soon she'd surely find herself going mad. But what now? She'd just accidentally turned herself into a mythical creature! Where was the instruction manual for this? More importantly, how the hell did you go back? Just moments ago she was perfectly alive, she'd known it, and now apparently she was able to swap between that and being a ghost? What kind of universal joke was this? The idea of ghosts was preposterous enough, but to be a ghost that was somehow still human too…

Both feet left the bed and were planted firmly on the floor, but when she tried to stand on them she wobbled; this form was incredibly determined to act as abnormally as possible, with special attention to the most popular laws of physics. It was a struggle just to stay on her feet as both seemed quite determined to divorce the ground. Somehow, however, she managed.

… Maybe if she couldn't pull herself out of this state in time for her mother to arrive back upstairs, she could hide in her closet. That might buy her a few extra minutes, at least until Maddie started to panic that her crispy-fried electrocuted daughter had evaporated into thin air. … She could maybe pass off her absence as having gone to the bathroom or something, at a stretch. In fact, maybe she could just hide in the bathroom instead… but that would require yelling responses through the door, and with the way her voice echoed right now, she really didn't want to test things.

Much as her mind still wanted to deny everything that was happening, the evidence was… mounting.

Regardless, if she wanted to take control of this situation, then she was going to have to stop panicking first. Deep breath in, hold for four seconds, deep breath out. This was real and this was happening, and she needed to be proactive about whatever she did. Deep breath in, hold for four seconds, deep breath out…

Before she figured anything else out she needed to get into that cupboard. Helpfully, the odd semblance of control she had over herself promptly died and she floated into the cupboard door instead, only just avoiding her face by throwing her arms out at the last second. This would have been wonderful if the action hadn't caused her to bounce off the wood, which led her to an even more serious predicament; Jazz was left floating in the centre of her bedroom with nothing to grab onto or push off, and absolutely no idea how to move. She was stuck.

… Where was that warm feeling, the feeling of being human? If it was there at all it was doing a wonderful job of hiding — apparently, it was quite happy to leave her stranded and awaiting rescue, which would have been peachy had she been trying to avoid rescue at all costs. She experienced a modest amount of panic and an embarrassing number of semi-swimming motions that got her exactly nowhere. That instruction manual would be wonderful right about now.

Don't panic was probably going to be her mantra for a long time, now. Nervousness flickered inside her as she wondered if there really even was an easy way to be human again.

Bad went to worse, quickly. "Hey, Jazz!" a voice called. Her brother, Danny's. He sounded like he was on the other side of the door. "Mum says she wants to call a doctor to come look at you!"

Did she dare risk replying? Her brother might be clueless at the best of times, but this voice was… no, if she didn't respond, then he'd probably just barge in to make sure she was okay, and that was far worse. "That's fine!" she yelled back, barely thinking about what she was agreeing to. "How long until the soup's ready?"

There was a pause — had he really not noticed the unearthly echo? Perhaps it didn't travel too well through the walls. "I dunno, I think she's using a can. Not long?" he replied, after a moment.

Oh. Excellent. That meant she had only a few minutes to sort this out. "Thanks!" she yelled back, listening carefully to Danny traipsing back downstairs, before returning to struggling about midair like something that was drowning. Had she just agreed to be seen by a doctor? But… what if they found something unusual about her, now? Really unusual? And that was only if she managed to get back to looking human again! God knows what sort of conversation she'd be having with her parents if she couldn't! "Oh, by the way, after the portal shocked me near to death, I can be dead sometimes and alive other times, and do you know how to get this flying thing to work?" Yeah, no thanks.

That wasn't even counting the exam preparation she wasn't able to get done right now. Being some sort of weird half-human half-ghost hybrid didn't mean she should be shirking from her schoolwork — it was going to be as big a part of her future as this weird ghost-like business might be, if it refused to go away! And there was always a chance it would go away. Portal after-effects, that sort of thing…

Though, if she was being honest with herself, she was far from convinced this was going to be a temporary arrangement.

Jazz made another awful attempt to get herself closer to the closet. She stretched in its general direction, fumbled slightly, and then suddenly realised what she'd been doing wrong this entire time; there was something inside her that controlled which direction she felt gravity from, and when she leant into that the correct way, she'd start to move. Unfortunately, her first attempt was less than subtle — instead of calmly drifting over to the closet door, she slammed into it face-first with a shout. The shock ran through her body, and as it did another flash of light appeared. The rings were back.

She was human again by the time she hit the floor. And very, very sore.

* * *

The shock of smashing face-first into the closet door alone was enough to hurt, but the pain Jazz felt afterwards was something else. The girl was only vaguely aware she'd reclaimed the traits of a normal human; she was far more concerned with the fact that her nose had turned into a bloodied version of the Niagara Falls, and was too stunned to even move, let alone stop all of that blood from running into her clothes. With the force she'd hit the door, she was incredibly lucky the bone wasn't broken.

Jazz brought her hands up to her face, unable to stop a few stray tears of pain. Obviously an accident like this only spelt good things for the future of her unwanted paranormal career. She'd screamed, too, and everyone in the house had probably heard her.

" _Jazz_!"

It was Danny. And in true Danny fashion he didn't bother with the subtleties, bursting through the door only seconds after he'd heard the shriek. And for Jazz, in tears and covered in her own blood, it certainly wasn't the most dignified of positions she'd ever been found in. Not that Danny cared — he was far more concerned about her general wellbeing than her relative dignity, and before she could gather herself together enough to tell him everything was fine, he was already panicking.

"Danny, relax! I just hit my nose!" she managed even as he fussed, but clearly it didn't help her little brother's freakout.

"What about all the blood?!" he stammered. "It's everywhere! How hard did you hit it?!"

"Pretty hard!"

One could not have stopped the fourteen-year-old from rolling his eyes at her totally nondescript answer, and he continued to fuss in spite of it.

"Just get me some tissues!" Jazz commanded, more to get her brother out of her hair than to stem the bleeding. Finally, she was starting to catch some of the blood by pinching the bottom of her nose (any other part was far too sore to touch), but, as if the moment was devised by the gods of chaos themselves, the moment Danny left the room her arm shifted out of phase. Blood ran straight back out again and she flopped her head back into the cupboard, groaning.

Her hand regained its solidity not too long after the damage was already done, and a detached part of her mind laughed at this spectacle — she wasn't badly hurt by any stretch, but she must have looked like a murder victim.

Soon enough Jazz found herself being helped downstairs, tissues held tightly around her nose and wearing a fresh set of clothes. By the time she made it into the kitchen she looked more exasperated and irritable than Danny did while being tasked to endure Christmas lunch. Maddie could stare at her for only a second before she leapt forward and swept her into a hug.

"Jazz! What happened to your nose?!" Well, it was swollen and red and looking rather angry. She supposed her mother would have to ask, but all she could manage in return was a tired look that was partially unintentional.

"I walked into my cupboard," Jazz replied, flatly.

"Sounded more like you ran into it to me!" Danny wasn't helping her argument. "Mum, didn't you hear it? It was like a crashing sound."

Maddie shook her head, finally letting go of Jazz. "I'm so sorry, I was down in the lab until just a few moments ago… oh, sweetheart, you must still be really out of it from the shock. I'll get you a cold pack."

Jazz's nod was so disjointed that one could have been forgiven for thinking her brain had grown legs and walked away. Nonetheless, she was still with it enough to appreciate the ready-made excuse — it was otherwise rather difficult to explain that you had not, in fact, run into your door, rather, you had lost control of your strange newfound ability to fly and ended up hurtling into it instead.

Maddie pulled out one of a number of freezing blue cold packs left within the freezer — the Fentons were never short on random injuries. She wrapped it thickly in a paper towel with careful precision and passed it to her daughter. Jazz sat down tiredly, heavily, at the kitchen table.

Okay. No more weirdness. No more even thinking abut weirdness. Last time that had set it off! She was with family now, and with any luck, she could remain perfectly normal until she could steal herself away back into the privacy of her room.

"That must really hurt," said Maddie, referencing Jazz's thankfully uncrooked nose. Her eyes were soft, saddened. But when all Jazz replied with was a noncommittal shrug, Maddie suddenly realised today's frightening context. "… Right," she added, correcting herself. "But probably not as much as that…"

"Mum said you got fried by the portal," Danny added, injecting his own curiosity into the situation. He'd seemed to come out of nowhere — Jazz, in fact, had almost forgotten his presence until the voice had wandered into her ears. As usual, he was lacking in subtlety. "You sure it didn't fry your brain a bit, too?"

"Wouldn't put it past it," mumbled Jazz, slowly letting her head descend towards the table. That cold back was just a little too chilly, and she removed it for a short period to stop it from freezing her.

"… What'd it feel like?"

"Danny!" Maddie shot, from across the table. "You shouldn't—"

"It hurt. A lot," Jazz finished, head still down. She didn't much care if her brother asked her these things. He tended to be blunt in a clueless sort of way, so giving him the benefit of the doubt was for the best.

Her nose still ached dreadfully, though.

Maddie left them there for only a moment. Before long, Jazz was asked to lift up her head, and a bowl of tinned soup replaced it on the table. Jazz liked tinned. The alternative was Home Recipe, which deserved its capital letters and didn't always guarantee survivors. Vaguely she wondered if ghosts ate anything at all, but picked up the spoon anyway and began to sip. Some buttered bread appeared to her side not long after, and she consumed it with the soup precisely and methodically. Pick up the bread, tear a piece off, dunk it slowly into the soup and then pull it out, let it drip, blow gently to cool it down, then eat. She took almost exactly the same amount of time with every single piece. It was as if her mind was in another place, another world…

… Somewhere like the Ghost Zone…

She snapped to attention, three-quarters of the way through her soup. No, she wasn't going to be tolerating any thoughts like that!

"Your father won't be home until after nine… but I told him what happened. He's glad you're okay, sweetie."

"I'm glad I'm okay too…" Jazz replied, though her voice was distant, her mind on other things whether she wanted it to be or not. What was it that proved she wasn't all ghost? Was it this physical form alone, or was that capable of being somehow replicated? Maybe it was the ability to eat. If ghosts couldn't eat, then surely she couldn't be consuming this soup and this bread, here and now…

… Vaguely, she was aware her eyes were glazing over, but she could probably just pass this off as a part of the shock, too.

"… Maybe once you're done with the soup I should help you back to bed." Maddie was starting to sound nervous, unsure. "I'd like you to stay there for the night, don't get up… at least until the doctor comes, okay?"

Those words seemed to awaken Jazz from her daze. "You called the doctor?"

Oh, that was a look of concern if there ever was one. "Sweetie, you were electrocuted. I had half a mind to take you to the hospital instead. He's just a home-visiting one, so there's no need to worry. You won't need to go anywhere to see him."

Jazz had barely stopped herself from retching on the remains of her dinner. She'd probably even made a funny face. Great. A doctor was coming after all. Granted, she couldn't escape her mother's line of reasoning — most people should get examined after suffering electrocution, after all. Her funny face slipped into a deep grimace, though, and she pushed the remainder of her soup away so that she could rest her head back down on the table; cold pack, tissues, and all. The bleeding had almost stopped.

Danny was staring at her with eyes like probes. Was that concern, or was it suspicion? On her brother both often looked the same, but if it was suspicion then he was clearly less clueless than his friends gave him credit for.

Once the blood had clotted the three of them lumbered back up the stairs. Maddie took one of Jazz's arms while Danny took the other — she found this completely unnecessary but didn't fight it either, as much of her strength had been consumed in the accident. A few days would be needed to completely recover, likely. Thank God it was a Friday night; that meant at least she wouldn't be missing any school.

… On the other hand, she'd likely be missing a whole weekend of finals revision. What a peachy proposition. The image of the coming exams loomed over her psyche like an unclipped hedge looming over a fence. It was, of course, filled with spiders. Each spider a question that she might not be able to answer, all because of walking into that portal. Each spider a red cross against her future.

She didn't much like spiders.

No more slip-ups happened as her mother tucked her into bed, and Danny left probably to play video games or call Sam or Tucker, something typical like that. "The doctor will be here in about an hour," Maddie had said, on her way out of Jazz's room.

 _Wonderful,_ thought Jazz. _One hour until my doom_.

Unlike the worried thoughts within her head, however, the soup was settling happily in her stomach. Instead of worrying too much she managed to fall into a nap, born more of physical exhaustion than of tiredness. Unlike when she'd tried to sleep earlier, this time her body was craving it.


	3. Phantom Limb Syndrome

**Author's Note:**

Hi! If you're reading this but you were up to Chapter 4 when it was there, this Chapter 3 actually extends longer than the end of the previous Chapter 4 due to restructuring and rewriting. If you don't want to start again from the beginning, start here! ありがとうございます！

* * *

 _Ch. 3: Phantom Limb Syndrome_

* * *

"Miss Fenton? Jasmine?"

Jazz opened her eyes with an unintentionally exaggerated yawn. A man in a neat white coat, greying and probably in his late fifties, loomed over her. He had a friendly-looking face with a slightly flattened nose and a faint but reassuring smile. At first, she thought he might be Chinese.

"I am Dr Matsumoto, your mother said you received a severe electric shock earlier this evening?"

Well, maybe Japanese, not Chinese. He carried only the faintest trace of an accent. "Electric shock…?" Jazz muttered. "Oh, right… yeah. Sorry, just—"

"Just waking up?" he filled in, still smiling, although the smile had transformed into something reassuring to something knowing. "If you don't mind I'd like to give you a physical examination, even if you've been up and about since the shock. I was told you have quite large burns — may I see them?"

Jazz obliged, somewhat begrudgingly. She pulled out her arm from underneath the covers and rolled up her sleeve, revealing the very same hand she had touched that fateful button with. By chance, the electricity's first point of entry seemed to have been there. The doctor looked stunned.

"Goodness, this is quite extensive…" he noted, examining it closely. "Hmm… more typical of a lightning strike than an incident with a machine. The burns are superficial though — looks to be about first degree. Are they causing you any pain?"

"… A little bit." Jazz was, of course, lying. Nonetheless, she referenced the tube of burn cream to her side. "That helps."

Dr Matsumoto took a preliminary glance at the Acriflex tube and nodded. "I'd keep applying it as necessary then." Was that a worried pause? "Branching patterns like this are caused most commonly by lightning strikes, creating what we call Lichtenberg figures — they should disappear within the next few days. If they don't, I'd like you to make a follow-up appointment."

"Okay," said Jazz, obediently.

"Can I look at the rest of the burns?"

"… Yeah."

Jazz removed her shirt and clutched a little to her bra underneath, not liking the feeling of being so exposed. With the look of her skin, however, it had to be done; the marks ran all over her back, chest, even over her very heart. She could feel her blood pressure rising as her eyes ran over it; she really hadn't looked all that hard when changing out of her other blood-soaked shirt, and the reality of this was now sinking in quite clearly. Dr Matsumoto frowned as he took stock of the evidence of her stupidity.

"You're a very lucky girl…" he muttered. "By the looks of things that came very close to your heart, if not striking it directly, and yet here you are."

"A walking paradox…" Jazz said, more to herself than to him. He shot her a curious look, then shook his head.

"Mm, well, people do survive lightning strikes and severe electric shocks, so perhaps you're not as paradoxical as you think."

But you don't even know the half of it, Jazz noted, in her head.

"Still, I do consider you very lucky. I'm going to check your heart rate and breathing if you don't mind."

Jazz nodded. The stethoscope came out, its metallic parts gleaming. She didn't know what the end was called — mentally, she dubbed it a listener — and it was pressed against her heart, and then against several other areas of her chest and back. Breathe in, breathe out, he said. She did as she was asked. Her blood pressure was taken too, as well as temperature.

"You're a bit colder than I'd expect…" he noted. "Your heart rate and blood pressure are both also a little lower than I'd hope for given your age and fitness level, though are within semi-normal bounds."

"So… that means I'm fine, then?" Jazz asked, hesitantly. Matsumoto's face curled into a frown.

"Well, though those symptoms aren't terribly concerning in and of themselves, I would like you to visit the hospital," he sighed. "You should undergo an ECG to check your heart, and aside from that, it would wise for you to have a complete blood count done, a urine test for muscle enzymes, possibly a CT scan as well to make sure your brain isn't too scrambled. I know you seem to be feeling fine, but an electric shock at this voltage isn't something to be toyed with. You can get these tests done at the hospital while being monitored."

"So I have to go to hospital."

He looked away. "I'm sorry, but yes, it would be in your best interests. I understand that for many they're unpleasant places."

Yeah, especially for people whose biology might be fundamentally different from anyone else's, Jazz thought desperately. What if they found something weird like ectoplasm in her blood counts? What then? So, for one of the first times in her life, Jazz went against an authority figure that wasn't her parents. "I don't want to."

Matsumoto crossed his arms at the sight of such a stubborn patient. "You could be risking your life."

"I'm not going. I have my reasons."

The two stared at each other, and just to break the silence, Jazz quickly replaced her shirt. "Thank-you for your opinion, and I appreciate it and understand where it's coming from, but in the end it's my decision."

There was another short silence. She couldn't help but worry about maintaining a totally physical presence while incarcerated in that white-walled prison, but she shouldn't have been thinking about it. Oh no. Because no sooner than did her mind grace those thoughts, her arm dropped straight out of phase.

Dead silence, before a cry of palpable, genuine shock. "What on Earth?!" said Matsumoto, long before he could stop himself. "How? What are you doing?!"

Jazz struggled to get the translucent arm well out of sight, but her haphazard solution really only made things stranger; she managed to phase it down through the bedcovers, but in her haste it went even further, sinking straight into the mattress of the bed. Matsumoto had only barely collected himself when this new revelation slammed him in the face like a brick.

"Your arm," he muttered. "I don't understand."

She'd been caught. She didn't know what to do, move or talk, but somewhere along the line she sunk the arm further through the mattress as if this might help things somehow. It did not.

"W-wait," the doctor stammered. "Can I see it?"

"No," said Jazz. No one can find out about this!"

"I'm not…" he paused, hesitating over his words. "I'm not going to say anything, Jasmine. To anyone — it's doctor-patient confidentiality. But I really need to see that again."

It was almost as if he was begging. Was the game really up already? She should have known better than to try hiding something like this, something so erratic and uncontrollable! But… at the same time, she didn't doubt the man. He was correct on the legal front — he was bound not to say anything to anyone without her permission by law, and he didn't seem the type to betray a person's trust, anyway.

… Not that she'd known him for very long, but that was the feeling she got.

Jazz could already tell her arm was settling into refusing to shift back into phase. She lifted it carefully out of the bed covers, unable to stop it from visibly clipping through the solid matter. Matsumoto watched on with round, dark eyes wide as if witnessing the moon landing on television all over again.

Okay. She was going to take a chance.

"This has been happening ever since the shock," she muttered, waving the offending appendage in front of him. "Actually, a lot of weird things have been happening since then! And I don't want to tell mum or dad, because they're obsessed with ghosts, and—"

"Ghosts." Matsumoto was incredulous. "I understand this is Fenton Works, but…"

"But ghosts are supposed to be impossible… right?" Jazz found herself sounding more desperate than she'd like, squinting uncomfortably at the arm that refused to be normal. "And this should be even more impossible!"

The doctor took a step back simply on instinct, then stepped forward again with a more determined, if hesitant, stride. "I'm sorry," he prefaced, "… But is it okay if I… have a closer look?"

Jazz shot a closer look to the bedroom door before she did anything else, but soon extended her arm towards Matsumoto willingly. He tried to take it in his hands but they slid through as if it were little more than smoke — he looked chilled after this, but still, he leant forward for a closer examination. Matsumoto adjusted his glasses several times as if he just couldn't trust what they were showing him.

"… Are you a ghost?" he said, quietly, after one very nervous minute.

"No!" said Jazz, as confidently as one could manage after the discovery that walls to her were not so much obstacles as they were methods of stopping light. "I mean, maybe kind of, but not… completely?"

"Not completely?" He wasn't swallowing that suggestion too easily, now checking the arm all over from different angles, as if searching for some kind of cheap trick. There was a pause when he became as dissatisfied as he could manage, and without taking his eyes away from her hand, he stood up straight. "Look, I — I'm going to tell you something my father once told me, back in Nagoya."

What could that possibly have to do with this? It didn't matter, Jazz decided to hear him out.

"He told me that if you see something you don't quite believe, it will always haunt you if you don't follow it and see what happens." Matsumoto took a short, audibly rattled breath. "So… is this the reason you don't want to go to hospital?"

"Yes! They can't find out!"

It wasn't any lie that she was desperate by this point. Maybe this entire thing could still be contained — maybe with just her and this… this GP. There was a moment's deliberation on his part — during this, he finally backed away from her arm, which she slid messily under her bedcovers where it couldn't be seen. Before long he was rummaging around in his bag, looking for something. Out came a small metal pen-like object and a rectangular tin case. He sat the case down on her bedside table for the moment and held up the pen — switching it on revealed a light.

"Can I please get you to look into this for a moment?" he asked, politeness at the forefront even under such circumstances. She obliged.

"Huh," he said, looking in.

"What is it?"

He adjusted his viewing angle, removed the light, and then shone it straight back in again. "That's a bit curious. Your eyes are abnormally responsive to light. … In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anyone's dilate so fast. They also reflect light surprisingly well, too…"

"Does that mean anything?"

"Well, you might be able to see quite well in the dark — other than that, nothing," he muttered. "If you were to actually go ahead and have the tests I suggested earlier, there's no telling what might be found."

Jazz looked away. Finally, and only with a bit of conscious effort, her arm resolidified. Of course, it remained bundled away under a mountain of warm blankets, but it would do. "I guess I'm finding out about all sorts of weird things now…" she sighed.

Matsumoto didn't comment — in fact, he stood there for quite some time, deeply lost in thought. There wasn't the smallest nuance of information that could be gleamed from his expression, as treating patients all his life seemed to have blessed him with a poker face that would challenge a telepath. After a final deep breath, he set about rummaging in that bag of his again. The pen light was replaced in an appropriate pocket, and then came out… a business card?

"Here, take this," he said firmly, holding it out with both hands. Jazz reached for it and sceptically scanned the phone number and email address provided. "This phone number's my personal one, not reception's," Matsumoto explained. "… I feel like I'm going to regret this, but if you need medical attention, call me. Not that I'll be able to guarantee anything given your…" he paused, sliding a word around carefully upon his tongue. "Situation."

"You'd seriously just let me call you?"

Matsumoto leant in — not into her personal space mind you, but far enough that it gave him a sort of conspiratorial look. "If you call me, I can try to provide you with help without getting anyone else involved."

The proposition rolled through Jazz's mind like a steamroller, ploughing through all other thoughts and worries with the idea of a raw opportunity. So, if something really did go wrong, then this meant that she would have someone she could visit if she needed medical treatment? And he was willing to do it… in secret?

This had to be too good to be true.

"… Why?" asked Jazz. "Why would you help me like that?"

"Because," said Matsumoto, "I am curious."

* * *

Dr Yuuta Matsumoto left without fanfare.

Jazz learned his name from the card: it listed his full name, clinical address, phone number, and email. Once he'd seen the magical semi-disappearing limb Jazz had thought it was all over, that he'd tell her parents, and that the game was up. The words lab rat echoed nastily through her mind. But instead it had been completely different — merely he had checked her over to make sure her vital signs weren't too alarming, declared that she should be fine without hospitalisation, informed her parents that she would probably be okay, and left.

Exhaustion had crept up upon her further. Though there'd been no more accidents with regards to her… — she thought about this very carefully before she decided on a proper term — condition, that didn't mean she wasn't tired and anxious about it, and that anxiety only grew worse as she thought about the looming exam period.

… Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to at least try reading her notes a bit. The focus might calm her down. Give her brain something to focus on other than all of the weirdness she'd been subjected to today.

Considering her parents had been happy with the doctor's evaluation, she wondered if she might be left alone to rest. That would be the ideal state of affairs, but of course, this was the Fenton household and ideal wasn't usually on the menu. Hell, even normal was a long stretch into infinity before you could even get close to it. But she could hope.

Jazz reached over to her bedside table, fingers slipping at first but eventually curling around her chemistry notebook. She might have been well and truly fine for psychology, that being her preferred subject, but chemistry could definitely use some refinement before the exam — she did want to get at least 95%, after all, and that wasn't going to happen without some extra dedication. Currently, she was staring at something like an 80, and that was not acceptable.

The notebook was carefully tabbed out. She flicked it open to the tab containing all of her notes on equation balancing and promptly dropped the entire thing straight through intangible fingers.

Jazz spent the next ten minutes with her arms crossed, waiting for her digits to come back to the real world again.

This was getting ridiculous. Was she going to spend the rest of her life were able to exist — something she was increasingly able to believe — how could a person made out of solid physical matter even utilise a power like that? The ability to… slide in and out of a plane of existence?

Did that mean her body was made up from something else, now?

No. She wasn't going to focus on that. She'd sat up tonight in order to read through her notes, and read through her notes she would.

Somehow she managed two hours of uninterrupted study time. Her concentration would slip around like a bar of soap sliding across the shower floor, but it was still studying time, no matter how unproductive the session might be. Jazz only put down her notebook after she heard her mother and father creep off to bed, perhaps worried that if they were any louder they might disturb her from what was supposed to be a restful slumber.

Her father, when he had gotten home, had probably thought the better of trying to wake her up. She deplored lying to her parents, but it had gotten her some much-needed peace and quiet. Maddie had forbidden Jazz from studying, but Jazz rather thought she knew better.

She slipped the notebook back into her desk and sunk down, down into the covers, wrapping herself within the warm confines of her bed. The blanket was curled around her as tight as she could make it as she laid on her side, gazing blindly out the window…

"… What happened to me?" she whispered quietly to herself.

Memories that would normally indicate insanity danced around her mind. She was human, but she was ghost. Like… some kind of bizarre half-breed, except that ghosts weren't technically a breed so the terminology had to be wrong in there somewhere. Aside from the ghostly traits themselves, there was no evidence to suggest she was actually dead, which made the situation all the more confusing.

The question was, what on earth could allow a human-made form real solid matter to pass through objects? To altogether forget that gravity was a thing that exists? Granted, in that strange ghost form she'd assumed not once but twice now, calling herself real solid matter may have been a bit of a stretch.

And in amongst all of this, in the back of her brain, the very back, there was just the faintest tickle of curiosity. Every one of her nerves told her to squash it down, but no matter how many times she attempted to erase its existence, it simply persisted. And as much as she tried to deny it, a small part of her wanted to see this strange other side to herself. To… to study it, even.

Maybe she was more like her parents than she wanted to admit. Jazz swallowed and reached for the little ball of cold contained within her chest.

 _Flash!_

The rings of light swallowed her up, changing her form from human to… to ghost. She'd have to get used to thinking that way — there was no other description for that form, no other way to explain it. Gravity fell away from underneath her even as she remained bundled up within her bedcovers, and after a moment, very quietly, she pulled them off.

Huh. Floating.

It wasn't so bad now that she wasn't bound by terror and time limits. She grabbed the side of the bed to push herself the right way up, eventually ending in some sort of cross-legged sitting position, although maintaining her place in the air. Still, Jazz had very little idea of how to get around exactly — since her previous attempt had been utterly disastrous — so she decided to remain where she was and just… treat this like research.

… Whatever she was made from right now, she decided it definitely wasn't the same as regular matter. First of all, it was squishy. Second of all, if she pushed too hard against it, it would wisp away into nothing, as evidenced by her newfound ability to shove her entire left thumb all the way through the palm of her hand.

She stared at this spectacle with disbelieving eyes.

This wasn't the same as becoming intangible — instead, part of her hand had literally disappeared in its entirety, unable even to feel, simply to allow her thumb free passage. And it didn't even hurt! Morbid fascination led to her rotating her hand around to view every angle until her own squeamishness caught up and she removed it. Her palm reformed as if had never even been gone.

Was she made from ectoplasm, the strange, apparently paranormal substance her parents kept in vast quantities in the lab? Over and over she'd been told ectoplasm could have these strange qualities when attached to conscious awareness, but up until earlier today, she hadn't even believed in ghosts. As far as she knew ectoplasm was just a bright green glowing substance that did little else than sit there and bubble away as a thick liquid goo. But now, what other explanation was there?

Bright green eyes searched the room for nothing in particular until they found her desk, where a blank notebook lay. The bedroom light was out but the doctor was right — her vision was much better than it had ever been in the dark, and she realised, with a twinge of excitement, that she'd even be able to make out handwriting easily.

… She was going to use that notebook for some extra chemistry notes on Saturday. But it wasn't like notebooks really cost that much, right? … She could afford to use it.

Jazz reached over to her desk, still stuck in one place hovering in the air, and grabbed the notebook and a pen. Her arms seemed to have a little more stretch in them than normal, as if they were struggling to compensate from her current unwillingness to move around too much. She flipped the notebook open, rested it upon her knee, and began to record the experience.

It was interesting that she never managed to have an intangibility accident in this form. And yet she felt that if she really wanted to pass clean through something, right now would probably be the best time to do it.

She filled two pages with notes. Thoughts, feelings, examinations, triggers, everything. They weren't well ordered — she couldn't get her brain well enough in gear to make them anymore structured than a genuine stream of consciousness — but it was definitely a start to understanding as much as she could about her strange condition. Her pen only stopped when she could think of nothing else to say, but still pensive, she placed her pen and notebook carefully on her bed and let her gaze drift out the window.

And this was all reversible too, wasn't it? Sleep and shock had each once caused her to revert to her perfectly normal-looking human self, but was there anything that stopped her from seeking that out by more efficient means? Just like —

No, wait.

Whenever she'd managed to do things consciously, it was all about thought and feeling. Turning into this ghost thing was something that she reached inside herself for, a coldness within her chest and a thought within her mind. What if the same was true to go back? Perhaps there was something inside her that she could tug at, hold on to, to see herself as effectively human once more. And she was right — it came in the form of a ball, a warm, inviting little ball of energy, in the same position that she could find the cold. If she held onto that feeling, if she wanted to be human again…

There was a flash of light. There was also an uncoordinated thump back onto the top of her bed. But she'd done it, she'd actually managed to change back.

It could be controlled.

And with unexpected fervour, she found shots of honest-to-God excitement tickling at her veins. She could control this, she could do things no one else could ever dream of doing. She wasn't sure what possibilities, exactly, this opened up — it had little to do with her schooling or her career ambitions — but she realised in that moment that she was truly unique, and really, maybe, no one else had to know. A strange kind of half-ghost hybrid. Who'd have even thought it was possible?

Of course, as her foot sank through the blankets, she realised she'd have to get the hang of this phantom limb syndrome before anything else.


	4. (04): Instructions Not Found

**Author's Note:**

Hello! Casual reminder that if you stopped reading at the original chapter 4 (not the one I'm posting here!) then you should start reading near the start of Chapter 3. The story has been restructured and slightly rewritten. Thank-you~! :)

In which Jazz tries to learn a bit about her powers, and has some mishaps along the way:

* * *

 _Ch. 4(04): Instructions Not Found_

* * *

Morning came as a hazy and entirely unwelcome whirl into Jazz's tired teal eyes.

She couldn't recall a time she'd felt that tired in the AM hours — normally she was one to keep an unscrupulous sleeping schedule, which meant, for the most part, waking up refreshed and restored whether it was a weekday or a weekend. Blearily she cast her gaze over to her alarm clock. 7:56. Four minutes until her alarm went off and signalled it was time to start the day. At least even in her fatigued state, her body's circadian rhythm was working its hardest in the background.

The events of the previous evening knocked on the doors of Jazz's memory, but they too were unwelcome thoughts until she could wake up a little more and pull her head together. So she cancelled her alarm, clambered out of bed and stood up, waiting for the inevitable dizziness to drain away.

Now, it was Saturday. What was she planning on doing today, again…?

Oh, right. Shopping. She was going to buy some weekend brain food to get her through the studying stints. The cooking could break things up and help give her mind a breather, and it would give her a chance to experiment with two dishes she hadn't tried making before, but seemed tasty enough. Jazz wasn't the best cook, but avoiding her mother's cooking sometimes was one and the same with occupational health and safety — trying to eat sentient hotdogs had never quite left the girl's memory.

One step forward. She felt groggy but normal. Memories of her arms and legs being able to slide through various solid objects stole her attention, but she broke away from it all again just as quickly. None of that had been a dream, she was sure. But it wasn't happening now, and as long as she could keep all of the strangeness at bay while she studied for her exams, she could indulge in her own curiosities later.

 _Mum and dad always loved ghosts more than you._

The thought had come out of nowhere and made a worrisome impact on her psyche. _No_ , she thought, _It's not like that and you know it_ , but the back of her mind was insisting otherwise. _They love ghosts, and now you are a ghost._

"Uughr," she managed, the soft and frustrated growl escaping her lips even if she wanted it quelled. Probably no one had overheard, at least, and she could just explain it away at being frustrated at herself for not being more fully rested. Danny was probably still asleep in his room. Her mother and father, however, had likely gotten up hours ago, unable to contain their excitement at finally having the Fenton Portal working.

A shudder ran up her spine. She didn't want to go down into the lab ever again. Memories of the shock ran through her like the very arcs of electricity themselves.

Whatever. It was 8 am. Time to trundle down the stairs and tackle breakfast.

The dining room loomed over the girl but nothing could quite loom over her quite like her father, in the friendliest way possible. He was smiling down at her with the same pride as someone might smile down on their daughter after, say, she had gotten married or been the first woman on Mars. Jazz gave her neck an awkward rub under the weight of his happiness.

"Jazzie-pants, you're amazing!" he cried, scooping her into a broad hug. She wheezed as the breath escaped her lungs. "Getting the Fenton Portal to work, you really are my daughter!"

"Thnks!" gasped Jazz. Jack suddenly seemed to realise what he was doing to her and put her back down on the floor where she belonged, all the while still absolutely beaming with pride.

"Now we finally have a real window into the ghost dimension!" His arms were waving around like an overexcited child. "You gotta understand Jazzy, this is the biggest breakthrough in ghost hunting since they first caught one of those suffering spooks on camera! We'll finally be able to see some of these spirits ourselves!"

Jazz opened her mouth to remind her father that, once more, she plainly did not believe in ghosts, but shut it again firmly as images of her arm clipping through solid objects flicked behind her eyes. After last night, she wasn't sure she could be a sceptic of much of anything anymore. It was one thing to see a ghost — that could be explained away as a temporary hallucination a glitch in your own brain. But to have experienced all of that herself while she was very sure she was awake had thrown her brain into a loop. If she could exist, then clearly, ghosts…

"Th-that's great, dad,"

Luckily, this was Jack, so he did not at all take her up on her sudden change of attitude in the matter. Merely, he seemed to assume she was just growing into her natural Fentonhood. And that was better for everyone.

"What are you going to do if a ghost comes out of there?" she asked, with some hesitation. Jack looked lost in his own imaginings.

"Well sweetheart, that depends on what sort of ghost it is. If it's friendly, we talk to it. If it runs, we catch it. And if it's bad—"

"You'll throw it back into the Ghost Zone?" Jazz guessed. Jack laughed at his daughter's innocence.

"You can't reason with an evil ghost! Mads and I are going to trap it and start the experiments!"

Jazz could feel her face running white. What those experiments involved didn't bear contemplating.

"You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost.

She paused, retching for just a second, before speaking up. "Um, yeah dad," she managed. "Sorry, I'm still a bit sick from last night."

He beamed at her again for something she really considered prime stupidity. "No worries! I remember when I got an electric shock like that, had me wound up for days!" Jazz seriously doubted he'd ever had an electric shock quite like _that_ in his life _._ "You want me to get you breakfast?"

She thought about it, but in the end found that she favoured self-preservation over convenience. "Thanks dad, but I'll be fine."

"All good Jazzy-pants! I'll be down in the Fenton Ghost Laboratory helping your mother out with some preliminary experiments!" He grinned and began to bolt, as gracefully as someone like him could bolt, to the basement stairs. "You look after yourself!"

"I will!" Jazz called after him. He disappeared.

Phew. Some time to herself. She got her cereal ready slower than usual and didn't eat it at a terribly startling pace either. In her head she gathered her day plan. First, she needed to drive to the supermarket.

… But what if her feet phased through the breaks? Her arms phased through the steering wheel? That was too dangerous to risk. She'd have to walk.

Perhaps living normally was going to be a bit more difficult than previously thought.

* * *

 _Okay, this is ridiculous._

Jazz had disappeared in the supermarket.

This wasn't the kind of disappearance where one went in and out of a shop, oh no — this was the sort of disappearance where you faded completely out of view of anyone at all. In fact — she was fairly sure — several people had been watching when she faded away, and she soon had to drop the groceries straight on the floor so they didn't look like they were defying gravity. There were hushed whispers of fright and all sorts of emotions running through the four people who had seen the incident, and she was forced to duck out of the way when one customer attempted to feel through the space she had previously occupied.

Of all the problems she expected to experience while growing up, this certainly wasn't one of them.

Right, now all she had to do was reappear. Preferably, somewhere she wouldn't be seen. Jazz made haste through the supermarket, dodging tiny children and little old women alike, trying her best to find an empty aisle out of view of the security cameras. Eventually, she found solace among the canned beans.

She eventually managed to reappear, regather her ingredients, pay for them, and sneak back home rather quickly.

* * *

By lunchtime, Jazz was utterly exhausted with herself.

The more she focused on any given part of her body, the more likely it was to drop straight out of phase. She had dropped her pen through insubstantial fingers no less than 18 times — she'd been counting — and other mishaps had been variously plaguing her morning. Now it was time to cook her brain food lunch, and she could only be glad when her parents opted not to show their faces outside of that damned basement. At the moment, her arm was invisible. In lieu of being able to effectively bring it back, she was forced to hide it behind her back when she heard Danny plodding down the stairs for 'breakfast'.

"Hey Jazz," he said, wearily, taking a seat at the dining room table. "You feeling okay?"

Jazz supplied a short nod and a slightly higher-pitch-than-necessary "Fine!". Danny shot her a strange look, but put it down to his sister's usual cheeriness and looked away.

"That smells alright, can I have some?"

She looked down at the meal. She'd really only made enough for herself. But at the same time, she took pity on her poor little brother, forced to grow up in this neglectful household of sickly obsessed ghost hunters and very little actually edible food. As his older sister, it was her natural duty to look after him.

"Okay," she said, caving. "You can have a bit." She went to reach out with her invisible arm, realised what she was doing, and hastily put it back. Danny didn't appear to notice.

"You sure the portal didn't scramble your brains up a bit?" Danny asked as she served him the food. Her right arm was still hidden behind her. "You're acting weird, Jazz."

"No no, everything's fine!"

No. Everything was not fine. Even though she managed to get herself to reappear properly for the sake of eating lunch with her little brother, this ghost stuff was a nightmare. She had no control over it whatsoever, and at the present rate, it was only a matter of time before someone found out about it. She hurried through her lunch and quickly stole away back to her room, under the pretence that she had quite a bit of study to do.

Jazz shut the door behind her and locked it, breathing out.

Okay, she was in private now, she could afford to make those slip-ups and mistakes. What she really needed was to — dare she say it — practice these damn powers until she could stop using them at random in public.

Jazz looked guiltily at her chemistry notes but decided that for now, it was probably more important not to have anyone truly find out she was exhibiting some worryingly telling signs of outright ghostliness.

The door was tried again just to make absolutely sure it was locked.

"Okay," she said, under her breath. "It's all about focus, right?"

Well, she was half right.

Jazz soon discovered that she _could_ , within reason, control intangibility and invisibility throughout different parts of her body, even to the point of isolating them into certain areas. But banishing these powers only worked easily when they hadn't been used accidentally in the first place; this is how she almost fell through her bedroom floor to the kitchen, saved only by some rather inelegant struggling and general panic. After this incident she threw herself spread-eagle on top of her bed, sweating slightly from the fright. She was pretty sure she yelled out, but no one had heard her. Danny had gone to see Sam and Tucker, and her parents were probably still tinkering away in the lab…

After this slight catastrophe, she decided it was probably best to go back to studying. A few hours and several more accidents later, Maddie and Jack left the house to go shopping for hardware. She was alone in the house.

Jazz carefully replaced her chemistry notes on the bedside table and stood from her bed, trying to relax and listen carefully — it wouldn't do to have her parents force their way back into the house and jump her, only because they'd forgotten something.

After five minutes of paranoia, she figured she was safe.

Study was done for the day. Her level of focus was waning at best, and she thought she'd probably at least gotten herself up to a 90% in Chemistry. All she could find herself thinking about was the strange situation she'd gotten herself into, and the more she thought about it the more enticing the curiosity got. Suddenly she felt almost on par and even _understanding_ of her parents' obsession with ghosts, although to be completely fair, she reasoned, she had a damn good reason to be thinking about the topic a lot. She was still trying to get used to the idea that ghosts could exist at all, let alone the fact that she could herself pass straight through perfectly solid objects. And she was _going_ to get a hold on this. Nothing stopped Jazz Fenton when she was determined — she had the past test scores and years of perfect grades to prove it.

She also liked to think of herself as reasonably brave. It probably wasn't true, but she liked to think that way, anyway.

Deep breath. Reach for the cold. A flash of light. The rings. Glowing. Not quite opaque. Ghost. She could do this. There wasn't anyone around to catch her if things started going horribly, horribly wrong. And she was still pretty sure she knew how to change back.

… _Pretty_ sure.

"Testing," she said to herself, quietly. The word echoed unnaturally around the room and came straight back to her, seemingly from every direction. "Testing!" she repeated, a little louder. It sounded a little bit like she was standing in a small tin shed. "… Nope, not creepy at all…"

Right. Maybe she would try exploring the house. A shiver of nervous excitement ran through her, but she couldn't quite place why. Of course, she still barely knew how to move, and that was immediately going to pose some problems.

Jazz put one foot forward in a valiant attempt at a step, got it right, only for the second attempt to sweep her off the floor. She wobbled slightly, barely maintaining her own orientation, before grabbing onto the knob of the end of her bed. Maybe if she could just use the objects around her to move from place to place...

It looked ridiculous, but it kind of worked.

Next obstacle: her own locked door. It was true she probably could have unlocked and opened it herself, but practice was the only way she was going to learn — with some trepidation, she pulled her entire body out of the physical plane, then attempted to push herself through the door.

It didn't work. She couldn't push away from anything. She just slid straight through. The whole intangibility thing was far more effective than she actually wanted. Jazz was doomed to float there, frown growing increasingly broad, as she realised that the only way to move properly was to learn right in the here and now. She couldn't even _walk_ through the door, her feet would just slip through the floor instead of gripping it, leaving her entirely stuck in the same place. But the injury incurred from her previous dreadful attempt at flight still haunted her memory too — it had been about as successful as throwing yourself out of a window, which is to say it hurt a lot and ended in self-inflicted grievous bodily harm.

Now if she got this flying thing wrong, she could look forward to hurtling herself straight out of the house.

"Okay," she muttered. " _Gently_."

She leant her centre of gravity ever so slightly forward. The movement was so slow that a particularly speedy snail might have beaten her, and she was privileged with the inanely macabre feeling of a solid object slowly sliding through and overlapping every part of her body. She could even feel the grainy wooden texture, which did nothing for the overwhelming sense of nausea that suddenly hit her. By the time she was finally on the other side, she had to cover her mouth and allow her stomach a moment to settle down. Her tangibility was called back the moment she was sure she was through.

 _What an incredibly human reaction to something so… Jesus_ , she thought. She could deal with simple limbs and very quick movements through objects, but there was something simply far too foreign about what she had just experienced. Maybe she could do with... a little more speed.

The next obstacle was the staircase. She'd have to change her orientation mid-flight for this one if only to avoid smacking her head into the roof. Jazz took a great deep breath, filling herself with all the positive thoughts she could muster. She could do this! She might not be able to do it smoothly, but it would happen! Sure as hell, it would _damn-well happen_.

She was right. Her flight certainly wasn't smooth. But it was also just slow enough to avoid injury.

To an onlooker, it probably looked like a hot mess of flailing limbs. To Jazz, it was a sheer success. She was flying! Well, sort of. More kind of just… floating in several general directions, very carefully. _Still a lot better than anyone else could manage._ And as long as she took this with deliberation and patience, she probably wasn't going to hurt herself — or at least not any more than she had when she'd thrown herself into her own wardrobe. The whole ordeal filled her with apprehension and confidence at the same time.

She got to the bottom of the stairs successfully, then swung a left into the living room. Everything here looked perfectly normal (except her). _Oh, if only her parents knew about this…_

But from here she didn't have much of a plan. What to do next?

Her deliberations were interrupted by an oddly metallic rustling sound coming from the basement…


	5. Spectral Phobia

**Author's Note:**

Surprise!

* * *

 _Ch. 5: Spectral Phobia_

* * *

A shot of adrenaline ran up Jazz's spine — noises, coming from the basement? Either her hearing was a lot sharper than it was before or someone had left the basement door open. Of course, that was hardly her greatest concern. Logically, if her brother was gone and her parents had left, then whatever was down in that lab was an intruder.

… The portal was working, now. Could it be possible that whatever that sound was made by… was it a ghost?

Jazz grabbed heavily onto the end of the staircase handrails and used it to push herself in the rough direction of the basement entrance. There was enough handholds to guide her around, at least, so that she didn't need to move forward too much unassisted.

Suddenly, a sinking feeling — if it was an honest-to-God ghost, then what type of ghost was it going to be? What if it was… malevolent? What if it attacked her? Could she even afford to take that risk?

… But down there was her only real chance of getting answers.

Jazz swallowed her fear and swung herself around in front of the basement door, then began carefully descending the stairs. "… Hello?" she ventured, voice echoing through the lab as if she had spoken from several directions at once. She hated it.

The rustling stopped, quickly.

"I-it's okay!" she continued calling. "Can I talk to you?"

Still no more noise. Was its source gone, vanished? Doubtful. Jazz neared the end of the staircase, feet just barely gracing the final tiled step as she willed herself to stand. It made her feel more reassured, for some reason — perhaps it was some type of metaphor with standing her ground, or other such nonsense that probably wouldn't help her if she actually got into any trouble. But there wasn't anything to see down here, either. The lab seemed empty.

Serious question: If she could just barely see an outline of herself while invisible, did that mean she'd be able to see an outline of other ghosts while they were invisible? Or would they disappear to her eye? A quick theory flew through her mind — was it that invisibility caused one to occupy some sort of higher plane of existence, temporarily, that a human eye couldn't spot but the eye of a ghost might just be able to search? She squinted around the lab.

Still nothing.

There was a part of her brain still berating her for entertaining such outlandish ideas as higher planes of existence, but it was suddenly quiet when she eyed the swirling green of that portal for the first time since she'd escaped from it.

A shiver tore through her spine. Never again.

"… Was I imagining you?" Jazz said eventually, not even slightly believing those words. She walked forward into the lab — actually walked! — and tried to trace every square inch of it with her eyes. The entire place gave her a bad feeling now, and she wanted to turn around and run and hide in her room, but she swallowed, and she fought this fear. "Is something wrong?"

A beaker smashed. Jazz's body stiffened and she whirled around to face the source of the noise, but she found nothing except shards of glass scattered over the floor. That beaker hadn't fallen off by itself — she knew better than that. You couldn't go through what she'd been through over the past day without an acute understanding that these petty things weren't going to be what she would normally chalk them up to be. And with that, she found herself taking hesitant steps backwards.

"S-sorry, I'll go—!" she managed, before a test tube on the table behind her rolled off and joined its brethren on the floor. This time she really shrieked and jumped, losing her grip on the tiled floor and flailing slightly as she missed her expected landing.

Okay, now she was spooked. That was definitely enough for one day. Her face felt white.

Jazz didn't so much turn as tumble around to face the stairs, making a wild attempt to push forward until she could grab solidly onto the handrail and drag herself up. The door to the lab was slammed behind her — not that it could ever do anything to stop a ghost that had even the slightest inclination to follow — and with fear in her heart she reached desperately for the small pocket of warmth in her core.

A flash of light. She fell hard to the ground and stumbled on her landing, but she recovered quickly and bolted through the house, bolted up the stairs, shot into her room and slammed the door. She didn't know what she intended to do, but before she could stop she found herself huddled with her head underneath her blanket, Bearbert clutched for dear life straight to her chest.

She stayed there, blinking in the dark, for several minutes. Her breath was caught in her throat. She seemed to be able to hold it for a very, very long time.

Silence.

And then, a cold — the sort of unpleasant cold that began in the centre of her chest and worked its way quickly through to her head. She gasped at this sudden intrusion, but this only gave birth to a breath of blueish mist that escaped her mouth, rising in front of her eyes as the cold subsided. What in the living heck was that? … The ghost?!

Jazz moved slowly, revealing just one eye as she moved the blanket out of the way of her vision. She couldn't see anything except her room.

"Hyuu-mannn," a horrible voice rasped, as if it had not been used in several decades. "But ghosssssst…"

It's in here! Jazz's mind screamed. She froze, not moving a muscle. … Could this thing taste her fear? Smell her terror? No doubt it was obvious that the lump on her bed was her, but she didn't know what it was going to do, and all she wanted was desperately for it to go away.

"Ghossst but hyuu-mannn," it said, a little more vigorously. "How, ghost but hyuuu-mannn?!"

The blanket was torn from Jazz's fingers, and she silently yelped as the only thing she felt was protecting her was unceremoniously ripped away. Now she finally saw it — an undefinable glowing human shape something, almost dripping with ectoplasm and possessing indistinct eyes and an undefined mouth. It was somewhere between alien, ghost, and zombie, and Jazz shot up against the wall her bed was backed against.

"Sssstraaaaange…" said the ghost, leaning in towards her. "Woo-man. Girl. But I sssaw ghosst. What iss thisss world? Is thissss the world the hyuuu-man shaped ghostsss come from?"

"I-I-I don't know!" Jazz stammered, her voice so much higher than she'd ever known it as her heart hammered away in her chest. "We don't see ghosts here!"

The nondescript monster of a ghost seemed a little bit taken aback. It arched straight and moved away from Jazz, blinking its black little dot-eyes as it thought. "Nuuunnnn? Nothinnng?"

Jazz nodded her head as vigorously as she could manage. Her eyes felt so wide — she might have looked mad.

"But youuu are also ghosssst," the creature proposed. "Thissss is not nor-malll?"

"It really isn't!" Jazz insisted. Her voice was so high that it was beginning to squeak. "I'm sorry! I've never seen a real ghost before! There's only me!"

"Why are you sssorry, not-real-ghossst?"

Jazz was beginning to lose whatever grip on sanity she had. "Because!" she stammered in response. "… Because—…"

It seemed to be thinking. A deformed green hand graced over the top of its 'mouth', if you could call it that, and its black bead eyes narrowed. "Anywaaaay, thankssss not-real-ghosssst for the portalll."

It vanished in front of her, and the chill left her bones. It was gone.

Jazz prayed to a God she wasn't quite sure she believed in, and vowed never to go down into that lab ever again.

* * *

Jazz didn't tell her parents about the ghost when they arrived home.

It was Jack who made first contact, delicately opening her door in a way that was utterly uncharacteristic of his personality. It was so unexpected that it genuinely set Jazz on edge until she saw who it was.

"Jazzy…?" he ventured. "You still studying?"

"Mmhmm."

Jack advanced into her room as she turned around to face her desk again. She wanted to project the air of someone who was simply acting as normal, busy with what would normally concern her. Certainly she didn't want him to see she was actually a nervous wreck, not the least of which because in the past 24 hours she'd seen the most impossible and improbable things known to man, and they had rightfully terrified the living daylights out of her. This was far easier said than done.

… Although, truth be told, the presence of her father was a sort of comfort; her parents might have been doting and strange but she was seeing them in a different light now. Perhaps they were the only ones who could truly defend against a ghost should it decide to get violent.

There was one part that made her deeply uncomfortable, however — the idea that they might find out that she was a ghost, and that their so-called greatest invention had done it to her.

"Your mother said you should stop and rest," Jack suggested.

"I'm fine."

He put his hand on her shoulder, and in spite of herself she flinched. He drew it away quickly, shooting her a strange look at the reaction. Nonetheless, he didn't question her, though it was obvious he knew something was amiss. Perhaps on his perception Jazz'd never given her father enough credit, though it was plenty true he had a habit of acting like an oaf. Jazz squinted into Jack's eyes.

"E-eh, sorry," she muttered. "Just a bit jumpy since… you know…"

Jack nodded curtly. Guiltily. He seemed to have had an amount of time to think about the consequences of his invention for his daughter, and it seemed to finally be hitting him.

"Dad, no, it's fine, it's really okay," she managed. "Just — studying just helps take my mind off it, you know?"

"Well, if you say so, Jazzy-pants," he said, and the look of concern he shot her nearly killed her. "Do you want me to sit in for a bit? Maybe you can quiz me on some of that fancy chemistry you've got going there."

But Jazz quickly remembered her failing ability to control her own powers, and shook her head. "Thanks, Dad. Maybe another time?"

"All right sweetheart. Call me if you need me, then."

"Will do, Dad."

As Jack left the room, Jazz breathed a deep sigh of relief. She could finally stop trying to hide her entirely invisible foot.

* * *

When Danny came home later that night, Jazz was at the end of her rope.

Images of that ghost flashed through her mind like a waking nightmare, she couldn't help but be frightened of her own parents, and she'd been fighting to stay halfway tangible all day. All of this while still somehow absorbing enough information to ensure she did well on her chemistry exam! The toll on her mind was clear — she was frightened and exhausted and she knew in her heart that she didn't have anyone to turn to. She couldn't drag her normal confidants — her teachers — into this strange, spectral world. And friends, well…

Truth be told, she often looked at Danny's friends with an amount of jealousy she didn't dare voice. Jazz was reasonably popular within her school, but close friends? Close friends were always something that had happened to Other People.

As she closed her chemistry book and stared hard down at her hands, she lamented her own circumstances. When other people needed a shoulder to lean on, they turned to her — she had the maturity, the psychology skills, and the knowledge needed to look after people. She had the trustworthiness for them to confide in her. But when it came to the deepest problems that ran through the roots of her family and indeed her own psyche, she'd only ever had her books. She didn't want to admit how lonely she was considering her popularity, but people who never saw her on the inside never quite understood just how starved she could be of actual, substantial relationships with peers her own age. She had always had only the teachers.

Danny's circumstances were different. He had two of the closest friends she'd ever seen, and in spite of his status as a worm that had fallen off the social grapevine and straight into the abyss, he could rely on them. And he could rely on her. God knows she'd protected him since the moment she'd been old enough to realise the danger behind their parents' bizarre household inventions — and even though they fought, and even though she wasn't always sure he appreciated his presence, she knew she was doing good for him, in the long run…

She stared a moment longer, and had the eureka moment she wished she'd never had.

Danny would understand.

Her brother, the son of two ghost hunters — you might as well call them accomplished, if only because comparing them to their peers would be comparing them to charlatans and madmen — he was the only person well enough versed in ghosts and close enough to her to confide in. The thought gave her the chills — what would she be exposing him to? He was fourteen, his mind was still young and impressionable, and this was a potentially frightening world that she'd vehemently denied the existence of for the past thirteen years of her life. He was in a critical stage of his mental development; he was in school, his grades were decent but not exceptional… could exposure to this world harm that? Who could tell?

But she didn't know who else to turn to, and she felt as if bursting at the seams. She couldn't keep a secret like this just to herself, and, well… Danny was interested in ghosts, wasn't he?

Jazz's heart felt heavy. Maybe he'd be excited to find this out, but in the long run, she had a feeling the information might become burdensome. There would always be that knowledge that her parents might mistake her one day, experiment on her — perhaps worse. She'd been given this burden alone to carry, and a decent part of her felt as if she was supposed to carry it alone, rather than expose the innocent.

Her heart felt even heavier when she knocked on his door and stared into his furrowed eyebrows and big blue eyes.

"What do you want, Jazz?" he asked, looking up from his phone. He was sitting up on his bed. "I don't have time for a psych lecture, I'm busy. Sam and Tucker are trying to—"

"It's about the portal," said Jazz quietly, shutting the door and locking it steadfastly as the words escaped her lips.

Suddenly, Danny seemed to care very little about whatever it was Sam and Tucker were trying to do, indicated by nothing else if not the lack of protest.

"Danny, I… promise me that whatever I tell you from now, it's a secret. You can't tell anyone, especially Mum and Dad. Not even Sam or Tucker. Okay?"

Her younger brother seemed a little taken aback, and was eyeing the door she'd locked behind her with outright suspicion. "You've been acting so weird since you got shocked by that thing."

Jazz managed a slow nod as she went to take a seat on his bed, holding on to the wooden end with a little more tightness in her grip than necessary. "Yeah I… I-I don't know where to start." Oh, her voice was wavering like a damn candle. This wasn't a good way to begin. "The portal didn't just shock me, it — it did something else to me."

But Danny actually cracked a smile. "You're not going to tell me it gave you superpowers or something, right?"

This time it was Jazz's turn to be completely silent. Danny was still laughing at his own joke, but stopped laughing very quickly and stared at her in what could only be described as a variety of stupor. "What?"

"Be really quiet," Jazz warned. "But after I got shocked, I was terrified, because I woke up and I — Danny, I was a ghost."

His brow furrowed. "Jazz, you're sure it didn't mess with your brain—"

"Yes I'm sure it didn't mess with my brain!" she shot back, and she found one hand over her face in her own frustration. "Just — just watch this!"

Jazz reached for the cold. It was harder to find, now, as if her own nervousness over revealing herself to someone so sceptical made the process that much more difficult. It took a few seconds to curl her mental fingers around it, and a couple more for it to activate — a process that had been near instantaneous when she'd been alone. Sure enough, however, the cold suddenly spread out, and the flash of light and the white rings washed over her form. She gripped the bed even harder now, determined not to accidentally float off in some random direction.

Danny hadn't said anything. He was too busy looking stunned.

"… See?" said Jazz, almost silently. The words reached her brother's brain regardless.

"You…!" he sputtered, far too loudly.

"Shh!"

"How can I 'Shh!'?!" Danny continued, about as close to hysterical as Jazz had ever seen him. "What is—!"

"Ssshhh!" Jazz repeated, again, even more urgently. There were some sudden hurried footsteps downstairs — she could hear them already, but could Danny? "Damn it Danny, they're coming!" she added, with a hiss. And then she reached desperately for the warm feeling to change back, barely making it before Maddie hammered against the locked door.

"What is it?! Is it a ghost? Danny?!"

Danny didn't have a chance to reply before the door was kicked in, God help the poor lock that had just flown out of its own latch. Maddie had disturbed their little 'chat' before it could even start. Danny's face was void of colour and managed a look of petrification that could only just be managed by someone who'd just seen one of their mortal terrors, and Jazz's serious mission face didn't inspire much confidence either.

"Both of you, where's the ghost?!" Maddie demanded. There was an ectogun in her arms — supposedly some sort of device designed to harm spectral creatures, though it remained to be seen if it actually worked. "What did it do to you?!"

Jazz snapped to attention first. "I-It's gone, Mum!" she stammered, looking down the barrel of that gun as if it might vaporise her in an instant — for all she knew, it could. "Out the window, onto the street!"

The ghost hunter didn't waste time. "Both of you, stay here!" she commanded. "I'm going to catch this thing before it gets away!"

And she was out again before either sibling could utter another word. Jazz's face had steadily been paling to the same colour Danny's had managed, and when they looked at each other again it was in utterly dumb shock.

Jazz swallowed. "And that's why I told you to be quiet!" she hissed. Danny shot her back an unhinged nod. "Come on, the lock's broken, we should go to my room. Hopefully this'll keep Mum and Dad busy for a while."

Of course, her room didn't offer much security either, considering her parents were quite willing and able to kick through locked doors and didn't care about the locksmith work that would be required afterwards. Nonetheless she closed the door and locked it after her brother, directing him to sit down on her bed.

There was a few moments of stunned silence, apparently having trundled over from the previous room with them. Danny shook, and he blinked, and eventually he cleared his throat.

"You're a ghost?" he said, disbelief clear. Jazz made a hesitant nod. "But — you're not dead," he added, and Jazz nodded again, vigorously.

"I don't understand this either," she whispered. "But it's like… it's like I'm half ghost."

A slight chilly breeze blew in through the open window, and in the distance, they heard their parents driving away.

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

The biggest thank-you to those who've supported this fanfiction thus far. Comments and criticism give fanfic authors life - not just myself - and help to support individual fanfictions to grow and prosper. You're wonderful.


	6. The Independent Variable

It had taken Danny quite some time to swallow information like this, in much the same way it had taken Jazz quite some time herself. It was, in fact, not something to be swallowed whole — it was the sort of information that needed to be chewed on for a while and then washed down with quite a few considerably strong headache tablets. She sat there and waited patiently for him to follow along with patience she had never afforded to herself, her shoulders enveloped in pale white hair, and her eyes glowing with that sickening green colour of the very portal that had created them.

Certainly, this was a step far away from the strict and stringent path she had drawn out for her life.

Jazz had taken refuge in her beloved office chair quickly and stayed there. Danny, however, had sat on her bed not more than thirty seconds before he stood straight up again and started pacing backwards and forwards in her room, his mobile phone still tightly held within his palm — albeit entirely forgotten.

"So… you're telling me there's _other_ ghosts coming through that portal? Like, they can just… come through whenever they want?" Danny asked. Was that sweat on his face? "There was another ghost _in here_?!"

"Mm," Jazz replied, stiffly. "I mean, maybe — maybe it wasn't a ghost though, Danny. It could have been—"

"Come on Jazz, as if it was your imagination!"

"Yeah, I know, but—"

Danny shook his head, consciously pushing himself back from the verge of hysterics. "You're sitting in front of me and _you're a ghost_ and you're telling me that _that wasn't_ a ghost?"

Unfortunately and quite deep down, even her sceptical soul knew he was right. She looked away from him and down at her two oddly glowing feet.

"Mum and Dad will never close that portal," he lamented, after a moment. "I don't want to see anything like what you saw! What if it's worse next time?"

Neither of them knew how to answer that, although at least the question was mostly rhetorical. Danny stopped his pacing and looked directly at Jazz, still analysing and taking in the strange state of his sister.

"… Am I scary?" she asked, eventually.

"No!"

"Really?"

Danny's arms were crossed. "Of course not, how could you possibly be— _shit what are you doing_?!"

"Passing through a completely solid object," said Jazz, who had managed to turn her arm intangible and was now using it to rummage through the contents of her desk draw, minus the tedium of opening it. "Danny, it's actually crazy, even when I don't look like this I can't stop parts of my body from suddenly becoming intangible! Or — or invisible! I don't know what to do! How am I supposed to hide this from our parents if—"

Danny retook his seat on the edge of Jazz's bed before cutting her off entirely. "You shouldn't hide this from them, Jazz! Maybe — they're ghost researchers, aren't they? Maybe they can do something!"

"What are they going to do, though?" Jazz asked, as she pulled her hand out of the draw and let it return to normal. "You know what they're like! If they find out, all I'll be is some kind of test subject to them! Danny, I — I need your help!"

His stare was as incredulous as it was lopsided. "Hey, it's not like I'm a ghost! How am I supposed to help? What am I supposed to do?!"

"You have to help me hide it!" she hissed, leaning forward and then finally deciding to get up from that office chair. She took one step expecting to hit the floor, missed, and nearly spun herself forwards midair. Danny was watching on with something that bordered between fascination and horror. "I don't know," she continued, with a deep breath. "But if something goes wrong, can you cover for me? Like, if I get stuck like this in my room, you can try to stop them from coming in until I figure out what the heck is going on?"

He was watching her reach desperately for some sort of handhold, now, and he leaned away as if coming into contact might shock him.

"Danny, please," she begged.

Eventually Danny gave up and hung his head. "Yeah… yeah, okay! Fine. Deal. But I still think you should tell Mum and Dad."

"I know, but it's not happening."

Danny crossed his arms, staring up at his far too spectral, clearly floating sister. "How the heck are you doing that, anyway?"

"That's one of the problems, Danny — I can't stop!"

"What, so like, there's no gravity? None at all?"

Jazz gave up on trying to find a handhold and instead attempted to make the most of her confused sense of balance. "There really isn't. But I don't know what I'm doing! I can sort of move around but if I make a mistake suddenly I'm tipping forward or hitting a wall and it's completely out of control!"

The look he was giving her wasn't one she liked. He looked like he was about ready to throw in the towel, debating on telling both their parents that his own sister was a ghost — or at least, part of one, anyway. But perhaps she'd been misreading his expression, because when he looked up again, his face had become unreadable.

"What is it, Danny?"

Was that a smirk? Wait, was that _actually_ a smirk? "Uh, I was just thinking," he said. "Hypothetically and all."

"What?" asked Jazz, a little more urgently.

"If you learned how to do this stuff properly, you could totally get into movie theatres for free. And like, top secret government buildings, and—"

"Danny!"

"No, really!" Danny continued, ignoring her plea. "No one would know! I mean, couldn't you just become invisible and then walk right through a locked door?"

"I'm not using this accident to commit crimes, Danny!"

He shrugged. "Yeah, but isn't it only a crime if you're like, human?"

" _I am human_!"

Danny stared at his sister, who was half a foot off the ground, pasty white, glowing, and had just demonstrated the ability to pass through respectably solid objects. "Sort of."

And at that Jazz quickly found her head in her hands. "Oh God, I knew I shouldn't have told you. You're fourteen, you're too young to understand this sort of thing, I should never have—"

"Jazz, it's okay! I'm just joking, all right?"

She stopped mid-gripe and drooped in the air, her arms hanging straight down if only because she had no idea what else to do with them. "Oh, right," she said, and made a few mental notes to dial back the panicking a bit. Panicking was what was going to damage her brother's mind, and their sibling relationship, to the point of needing serious repair. She needed to control it as much as possible, because like it or not, she was still the Responsible Big Sister in this relationship, and she needed to behave as such.

But he was just sort of… staring at her now, lopsidedly. "And you can just change back whenever you want?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Huh," he said. "So it's not like you're dead or anything, you've just got… super powers or something, then. Ghost powers? That's kind of cool."

"… Cool?" Jazz asked, tiredly. "I'm really not sure it's cool, Danny."

"Oh come on, didn't you ever want super powers? Even a little?"

Truthful answer? Yes, every now and then, just a little bit. For sure it would have made bringing up her brother in the hostile environment of their parents' household laboratory a bit easier — perhaps some faster reaction times and the ability to phase through the newest dangerous invention could have saved them both some grief.

But Danny had always been the one who really wanted the world of the impossible.

He longed for it in a quiet way, but every so often you could see a spark in his eyes when their parents spoke of exploring the Ghost Zone, or when he was reading some superhero comic, or even when he talked about wanting to be an astronaut. If this accident had've happened to Danny, it would have suited him almost perfectly. He might just even have enjoyed it once the initial shock was over.

But the world was cruel, and had made it happen to Jazz instead.

"Stop being so responsible for once in your life, Jazz," Danny continued, and there! That was the very spark in his eyes that she'd just been thinking about. "You didn't actually die, and now you have these cool powers!"

"Uh-huh," said Jazz, a little bewildered.

"Hey, we should go up to the Emergency Op Centre and test them!"

At that point Jazz's chemistry notes started flashing through her mind, and she looked back at them and understood quickly just how much she really needed to keep studying — 100%s didn't come out of nowhere, and they were even more difficult when your study time was interfered with by randomly malfunctioning ghost powers. But Danny didn't care about that, as was plain to see, as no sooner than she looked away he had taken her hand within his own and was easily dragging her exceptionally light body towards the bedroom door. "Come on," he said. "We'll know if Mum and Dad are coming from up there, too."

"Hey, what—I didn't say I wanted to do this!" she rallied. "Danny, stop! This form's too light, I can't—"

"Just trust me!"

She didn't trust him at all, but there was some part of her just allowing this dragging-along thing to happen, as if her own body was betraying her wishes. True, she could've changed back to human and come crashing down with an unceremonious _thump_ , thereby destroying Danny's ability to continue taking her to the Op Centre, but she couldn't find it within her to reach for it. And quietly, very quietly, there was a part of her mind that knew what must be done: If she wanted to study, she needed to learn to use these powers so that they didn't wildly malfunction.

She just wasn't sure if that could be learned in a day, or learned at all.

"You're pretty cold," Danny noted, as they exited her room and made for the spiral stairs at the end of the hallway. "So like, are you all ghost right now? Do you need to breathe or anything?"

"No, I — I don't know. I don't think so? Breathing, I mean," she clarified. "I don't know, this feels pretty all-ghost to me…"

"So what's that feel like?"

He was starting to climb the final staircase now with Jazz in tow. As much as she loathed to admit it, she was starting to enjoy this just a little bit — all she needed to do was float along, and Danny took care of dragging her around. It certainly beat struggling through the air by using objects as unceremonious launchpads, and as long as she kept moving with him her hair didn't try to float back in front of her too much.

As for what it felt like, that was more difficult. In the end she gave him no answer.

The Emergency Op Centre was exactly as Jack and Maddie had always intended it — huge. Far too big to be sensibly placed on top of a townhouse and yet here it was, complete with violated council permits sitting on one of the main control panels. Jazz was reasonably sure her parents had used some of their government grant money to pay off the local council so that they could be allowed to keep it, and wondered dearly what better use that money could've gone to. But now — now she was a little bit pleased the Op Centre was here. There was room to move in this place, and there were security cameras that showed you any activity that was occurring downstairs, though no audio feed was attached. Originally this had creeped the hell out of Jazz and she'd vowed to stay in her unsurveilled room as much as possible, but she sure did appreciate the system now — they'd be able to see exactly when Maddie and Jack had finished their wild goose chase after the ghost that may or may not have existed.

"There, see?" said Danny, apparently proud of himself. "Perfect superpower training ground."

"Don't say it like that…" she told him, tiredly.

"Fine, _ghost powers_ ," he replied, correcting himself the wrong way. He pointed over to the other side of the Centre. "Anyway, you should try to fly over there."

The other side of the room. She could manage that, right? Without hurting herself, this time?

When Danny let go of her hand, however, she was less sure.

In a way, it reminded her of a child taking its first steps. She leaned forward a little and tried to will her body in the designated direction, and it was hesitant and awkward and very, very slow. But she was moving! And she didn't need an object to do it! She was moving on her own, as she'd already sort of learned to do, but maybe now she could learn to do it properly — assuming there even was any proper way for a human to fly that didn't involve an aircraft, anyway. She wobbled as she went.

Her turn at the end of this venture was disgraceful, but Danny seemed awestruck regardless, and wasn't even attempting to hide the streaks of excitement bouncing around inside of him. "Okay, now come back!" he commanded.

… This kid really did change gears fast.

Jazz began her return trip, and it was far from pretty. She tried to speed up given a bit of newfound confidence, and subsequently realised that it was much more difficult than she'd hoped to be able to control. At one point she could see the floor coming up to her face much quicker than she'd like, but she adjusted her flight path and thankfully avoided the type of face-meets-tile collision that tends to ruin days and faces past-blessed with straightened teeth.

… In spite of the problems, though, it felt good, and in amongst the adrenaline she found herself with a stupid grin by the end of it. As a ghost her form felt light and nimble, if a little bit too reactive to the smallest influences, and as much as she didn't want to admit it, it gave her a type of freedom that her human form simply couldn't. This wasn't supposed to be something she enjoyed, it was supposed to be the bizarre and horrifying result of some freak accident that really should have killed her! She was supposed to still be freaking out by the previous appearance of a real ghost, even if it hadn't been outright malevolent! And yet… and yet…

By the time she wiped her grin away, it was far too late. Even Clueless Danny could read her mind like an open book. "You do think it's cool, admit it!" he demanded.

"Yeah, well," she muttered back, but such a poor defence was going to fall on deaf ears. "Okay, fine, it's really… it's really different, and…

"And?"

"And it's kind of cool, okay?" she sputtered out. "But this is still a huge problem Danny, I can't control these… ghost powers… when I'm human! Maybe I can't fly like that, but the other abilities just happen so suddenly, and I can't always turn them off! What am I going to do?!"

Danny shrugged, with a self-assured little grin on his face. "Well, maybe you should _study_ it. You know, like you're always telling me to do my homework, or my life will be ruined."

Ooooh, her little brother could really get on her nerves sometimes, much as she did love him. The biggest problem in this series of problems was that he was actually right — if she didn't study this, her life could very well be ruined. It'd take one accident in the middle of class to have everyone never look at her normally ever again, and that didn't even touch on the issue of what might happen should her parents or the government find out. With renewed but indignant resolve, she willed herself down to the floor, tried not to bounce back off it, and transformed to her far more familiar human self.

A swath of orange hair suddenly understood gravity again and fell down straight over her face.

 _Of course_ Danny was nearly in stitches.

"Hey!" he managed, through his own fits of laughter. "You look like Cousin Itt with orange hair!"

" _Thanks_."

"No problem."

 _Don't strangle your little brother, it's against the law and morally reprehensible_ , Jazz told herself, grabbing her hair and tossing it back over her teal-coloured headband. "Can you please be serious for more than two seconds?" she begged. "You win! Yes it's kind of cool and yes, if I could just understand how to use them properly I could probably use these powers to do anything I want, but there's really a lot at stake here. I mean, what if the government finds out, Danny? It's not just our parents who research ghosts, and you know it. The government's not going to care who I am or that I'm someone's daughter, someone's brother. They're just going to see a specimen they need to acquire! That's what governments are like!"

That was what had finally gotten the boy silent — an honest assessment of the potential dangers such a "blessing" could bestow, peppered with the very realistic notion of suddenly losing his sister. Perhaps they didn't always get along, and perhaps they did fight, but at the end of the day they cared about each other, and they were the only ones who would understand the true nuttiness of their own parents. Danny's eyes fell to the tiled floor, eyeing it solemnly.

"… Right," he said. "No, you're… do you really think the government would do that?"

"We've both met them. You know what they wanted."

Danny nodded. "… Yeah. Any specimen at any cost, right?"

"Any specimen at any cost," she echoed. "But that makes you right."

"I'm right?"

Jazz nodded, a small but nervous smile gracing her lips. "I need to practice. These — these invisibility and intangibility accidents can't happen, but the only way I can avoid them is if I understand how these… powers work," she paused, before placing one hand upon her brother's shoulder. "I'm sorry for my reactions. I just… I don't know what I'm doing, and it's scary, Danny. I really, really don't know what might happen over the next few weeks. Maybe these powers will just disappear, or maybe I'm going to stay weirdly half ghost for the rest of my life. Or maybe someone will find out. I don't know… I didn't plan for this."

In a rare act of maturity on his part, Danny shot her a tiny smile. "Yeah… I guess you wouldn't have planned for this. Like, ever. You don't even believe in ghosts."

" _Didn't_ ," Jazz corrected.

"Whatever. The point is, I get it," he finished. She wasn't sure about that, but at least his heart was in it.

"Heh. Thanks, little brother."

"No problem, Jazz."

A beat.

"Actually, do you wanna get some snacks first?"

Jazz laughed. She couldn't help herself. "Yeah," she said. "Let's do that."


End file.
